

BY 
GROSART 




FAMOUS 
♦SCOTS* 
► SERIES* 




■*:>:: :::::::::::: :::::: ::*::*: 



Library of Congress. 04 



c«.p..]}A44^' 






1 



Btf^UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.,cM 




<yc 



ROBERT 
FERGUSSON 



FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES 



The following Volumes are now ready — 
THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson. 
ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton. 
HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask. 
JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes. 
ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun. 
THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie. 
RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless. 
SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson. 
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden Blaikie. 
JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask. 
TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By Oliphant Smeaton. 
FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond. 
THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir George Douglas. 
NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood. 
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury. 
ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart. 



ROBERT! 
FERGUSSON 

/BY 

• • /\ • £5 

GROSART 



FAMOUS 

scots: 

SERIES 



V 




PUBLISHED BY I 
CHARLES f*<*U35 
SCRIBNER'S SONS 
J&^TT NEW1TORK 










o 



294 



PREFACE 

The myth that no one reads a preface, I cannot allow to de- 
prive me of the pleasure and privilege of recording here the 
more than kind helpfulness of many fellow literary workers 
in this little labour of love. In turning to the forewords to 
my youthful Life and Works of Fergus son (1851), that I 
might re-thank former friends, I found that of a long roll 
of names therein, not a single one survives to-day. I 
alone remain. I may be pardoned feeling the pathos of this. 
The same willinghood and actual services of former friends 
have been shown by many new helpers of the present genera- 
tion. ' It would occupy too much space in a book that 
needs every inch available, to enumerate my correspondents 
and aiders ; but I offer one and all, publicly as already 
privately, my heartfelt thanks, together with acknowledg- 
ments in the several places. It will not, I hope, be held 
invidious that, besides this general acknowledgment of 
debt and in their places, I name the following as having 
rendered me special help, biographically and critically : — 
Mr. William Keith-Leask, M.A., Aberdeen, who took the 
pains of carefully reading the whole of my first rough MS.; 
Rev. J. G. Michie, M.A., Dinnet; Rev. Andrew Christie, 
M.A., Kildrummy; Lord Aldenham, who did not rest 
until at India House and Bank of England he had verified 
the Burnett gift of ^100, and not less so the prompt and 
laborious attention of the officers of both ; Lord Rosebery, 
for books and MSS.; J. Maitland Thomson, Esq., M.A., 
Advocate, Edinburgh, for countless notes on countless points; 
the Rev. Walter Macleod, M. A., Register House, Edinburgh, 
for successful researches in his great storehouse ; J. Logie- 
Robertson, Esq., M.A., for his collected newspaper-cuttings 
and articles, and other helpfulness ; James Colville, Esq., 

Glasgow, for luminous reading of my chap. xi. ; and last 

5 



6 PREFACE 

but not least, Mr. Oliphant Smeaton, M.A., Edinburgh, for 
unfailing attention to numerous commissions. 

I can in integrity affirm that I have spared no pains to 
fulfil a lifelong cherished purpose of adequately writing the 
Life of Robert Fergusson, and I indulge the hope that at 
long last something like a worthy Life is now furnished. 
Exigencies of space compel me to suppress a full biblio- 
graphy of the Poems, critical Essays home and foreign, 
notes on Portraits, etc. etc., that I had prepared. 

I add that, whilst in no manner of way wishing to forestall 
criticism whether of matter or form, I must be permitted 
to ask remembrance of how meagre and inaccurate other 
Lives of Fergusson were prior to mine of 185 1, and to 
specialise these things as for the first fane given — the 
paternal and maternal descent of the Poet traced; that 
visit to his uncle in the North, whose failure was a funda- 
mental factor in his career, fully told ; new light on the 
home-life and his father's employments and his death-date 
ascertained, with new letters and papers ; his schools and 
course at St. Andrews University, elucidated from fresh 
materials ; the circumstances of his return to Edinburgh 
and abandonment of studying for the Kirk vindicated ; 
the advent of Scotland's second vernacular poet with a new 
note, stated and established ; the ' malevolent conscientious- 
ness ' of certain biographers on falsely alleged ' dissipation ' 
and misconduct, exposed and refuted, with revelations of 
Edinburgh society of the period ; the relation of Burns to 
Fergusson, and our claims for Fergusson as a Scottish poet 
presented and enforced ; new light on the final act of the 
tragedy of his young life ; recovery of the facts of the 
Burnett draft for ^100, and an invitation to India that 
arrived ' too late ' ; the second marriage of his widowed 
mother ; and not a few other data from authentic documents, 
e.g. birth-entry, burial-entry, etc. etc. 

I shall hope that one outcome of this new Life will be 
to unite ' brither Scots ' at home and far away to place a 
monument in Edinburgh to her young Poet, as Robert 
Louis Stevenson counselled, and as Andrew Lang thinks 
of doing himself in a memorial-window at St. Andrews. I 
do not mean to let this sleep. 

Alexander B. Grosart. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Introduction — Claims for a Place amongst 'Famous 

Scots' 9 

CHAPTER II 

1 An Ell of Genealogy' — Fergussons and Forbeses . . 17 

CHAPTER III 
Parentage — Birth — Birthplace — Childhood ... 26 

CHAPTER IV 

Schooling and Schools — Family Lights and Shadows — 

Visit to the North 37 

CHAPTER V 
University of St. Andrews 49 

CHAPTER VI 
Return to Edinburgh — Second Visit to Uncle John 

Forbes 65 

CHAPTER VII 
Home again — Drudgery 77 

CHAPTER VIII 

Advent as a Vernacular Poet — A 'New Note' . . 89 

CHAPTER IX 

Statement and Apologia — Society of the Period — 

Convivalia 106 

CHAPTER X 
1 Beginning of the End' — and ' The End' .... 121 

CHAPTER XI 

The Relation of Burns to Fergusson — Poetry of the 

Country as well as City 137 



Passing quaint Robert Henryson, 

Robert the First, was Fergusson ; 

Whose ' Farmer's Ingle ' still glows red, 

'Mongst Doric classics numbered. 

Next Scotia wistfully turns 

To Robert Second — Robert Burns : 

His ' wreath of holly ' he still wears, 

Nor Time, nor Change one green leaf seres : l 

So shall they aye together stand, 

Greater and lesser, hand in hand ; 

Twin-singers of their native Land. 

Who shall our heart-homage reprove? 

Commingled pride, and ruth, and love. 

Fergusson's Life, in youth I writ, 

And dar'd my little lamp to lit, 

That I might his dim'd name relume ; 

To fading wreath restore perfume ; 

Putting the Pharisees to shame 

For their self-righteous scorn and blame ; 

Who sought his memory to stain 

With moralising, cheap as vain, — 

And golden words shew'd I was heard, 

For far and near Scots hearts were stirr'd : 

And now again I write of him 

In elder years, my eyes still dim 

With pity for his sad short life, 

Ever with Poverty at strife ; 

His drudgery for scanty wage, — 

A skylark prison'd in a cage ; 

His friendlessness ; his sordid cares ; 

His tempters with their deft-plac'd snares ; 

His tragic end ; his mere boy's years : 

Key-cold the heart that sheds no tears. 

A. B. G. 



1 Muse of Scotland to Burns — 



' And wear thou this — she solemn said, 
And bound the holly round my head.' — The Vision. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 



CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION — CLAIMS FOR A PLACE AMONGST 
' FAMOUS SCOTS ' 

. . . ' While the lark sings sweet in air 
Still may the grateful pilgrim stop 

To bless the spot that holds thy dust.' 

Thomas Campbell of Burns. 

That Robert Fergusson stands transfigured for all 

time, in 

1 the gleam, 
The light that never was, on sea or land, 
The consecration, and the Poet's dream,' — 

from the homage paid to him by Robert Burns — William 
Wordsworth — Thomas Carlyle — and Robert Louis 
Stevenson — selecting four representative names out of 
many more, — may surely be accepted as sanction of placing 
him amongst ' Famous Scots,' and of our task of love, the 
re-writing of his pathetic story. 

I know not, therefore, that I can better introduce Robert 
Fergusson to Englishmen and Americans and my fellow- 
countrymen who do not know him as they ought, than by 
letting the four immortals speak for him and me. 

I. Robert Burns. 

The keynote of Burns's admiration and gratitude is struck 
in his autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore, as follows : — 

' Rhyme, except some religious pieces that are in print, I had given 
up ; but meeting with Fergusson's Scottish Poems, I strung anew my 
wildly-sounding lyre with emulating vigour.' 

9 



io FAMOUS SCOTS 

We shall see, hereafter, how critically as well as ethically 
accurate and generous was the word ' emulating,' to express 
the outcome of this epoch-making ' meeting with Fergusson's 
Scottish Poems.' 

Before passing on, it may be here anticipatively noted 
that besides our own biographers and critics, not only 
Angellier and Demonceau, Traeger and Hincke, but a 
whole band of French and German translators and inter- 
preters of Burns recognise and accentuate the significance 
and potency of this ' meeting.' ' Inspirer ' is their usual 
word. 

In Verse and Prose alike, Robert Burns was never 
weary of acknowledging his obligations to his young 
precursor, as these additional testimonies will witness. 

I give first of all his 'Verses written under the portrait 
of Fergusson, in a copy of that Author's Works, presented 
to a young lady in Edinburgh, March 19th, 1787 ' : — 

' Curse on ungrateful man, that can be pleas'd, 
And yet can starve the author of the pleasure ! 
O thou, my elder brother in misfortune, 
By far, my elder brother in the Muses, 
With tears I pity thy unhappy fate ! 
Why is the Bard unfitted for the world 
Yet has so keen a relish of its pleasures ? ' 

Further, — everyone knows who knows anything of either, 
that a pilgrimage to the then unnoticed grave of Fergusson 
was among the earliest acts of Burns after his arrival in Edin- 
burgh, and how he knelt down and with uncovered head and 
passionate tears kissed the sod that covered the 'revered 
ashes.' His letter to the Magistrates reveals how genuine was 
his emotion. It is my privilege to reproduce it from the 
Second Commonplace Book — a priceless MS. just acquired 
for the Alloway Museum in Burns's cottage. I have deemed 
it well to mark the erasures and corrections of the MS. as 
evidencing the painstaking with which it was written. 

1 To the Honorable the Bailies of the Canongate, Edinburgh. 
Gentlemen, 

I am sorry to be told that the remains of Robert Fergusson the 

for ages to corru 

so justly celebrated Poet, a man whose talents a will do honour fot 

in your Churchyard 

age: to .^ ciae, to our Caledonian name, lie a among the ignoble 



ROBERT FERGUSSON u 

Dead, unnoticed and unknown ia yo us-C kurohyardr Some memorial 
to direct the steps of the Lovers of Scottish Song, when they 
wish to shed a grateful tear over the "Narrow House" of the Bard 

tribute 

who is now no more, is surely a 4e& due to Fergusson's memory : 

tribute 
a debt I wish to have the honor of paying. I petition you then, 

your 
f"ryorraic for a permission 

Gentlemen, to allew to lay a simple stone over his revered ashes, 
to remain an unalienable property to his deathless fame. 
I have the honor to be, 
Gentlemen, 

Your very humble servant, 

Robert Burns.' 

Willing consent was given, and the ' simple stone ' was 
erected, and still remains, having been well cared for. 

By the phrasing — ' lay a simple stone ' — Burns evidently 
intended a flat stone or throoch stone, to cover the entire 
grave ; and, in accord with this, he composed an inscription 
that would have filled it. An erect or head-stone having 
been chosen, only one stanza — first of three, it will be 
seen— was carved on it ; but the complete inscription is 
preserved along with the letter, thus : — 

' Epitaph : Here lies the romaino of Robert Fergusson, Poet. 
He was born 5th September 1751, and died 16th Oct. 1774. 

No pageant bearing here nor pompous lay, 

' ' No story'd urn nor animated bust ; " 
This simple stone directs old Scotia's way, 

To pour her sorrows o'er her Poet's dust. 

She mourns, sweet, tuneful youth, thy hapless fate, 
Tho' all the powers of Song thy fancy fir'd ; 

Yet Luxury and Wealth lay by in State ; 

And thankless starved what they so much admir'd. 

This humble tribute with a tear he gives ; 

A brother Bard, he can no more bestow ; 
But dear to fame thy Song immortal lives, 

A nobler monument than Art can show.' 

On the stone itself st. 1 1. 1 reads ' No sculptur'd marble,' 
and 1. 3 ' pale ' for ' old.' 1 

1 Because long subsequent, the opening stanza is found on Allan 
Ramsay's stone, Burns's authorship has been hastily questioned. The 
MS. puts it beyond dispute. 



12 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Another kindred poetic tribute which was discovered by 
Dr. Robert Chambers on a fly-leaf of an odd volume of the 
World is as follows : — 

' Ill-fated genius ! heaven-taught Fergusson ! 

What heart that feels and will not yield a tear 
To think life's sun did set ere well begun 

To shed its influence on thy bright career? 
Oh ! why should truest worth and genius pine, 

Beneath the iron grasp of want and woe ! 
While titled knaves and idiot greatness shine 

In all the splendour Fortune can bestow. 

With finer touch another verse-tribute is wrought into the 
' Epistle to W. Simson ' — 

1 My senses wad be in a creel l 
Should I but dare a hope to speel 
Wi' Allan, or wi' Gilbertfiel, 2 

The braes o' fame ; 
Or Fergusson, the Writer chiel — 
A deathless name. 

O Fergusson ! thy glorious parts 
111 suited Law's dry, musty arts ! 
My curse upon your whinstane hearts, 

Ye Embrugh gentry ! 
The tythe o' what ye waste at Cartes 

Wad stow'd his pantry.' 

Finally — there are the unaffectedly sincere words of the 
preface to the Kilmarnock vol. of 1786 : — 

' To the genius of a Ramsay, or the glorious dawnings of the poor, 
unfortunate Fergusson, he with equal unaffected sincerity declares, that 
even in his highest pulse of vanity, he has not the most distant pre- 
tensions. These two justly admired Scottish poets he has often had in 
his eye in the following pieces ; but rather with a view to kindle at 
their flame, than for servile imitation.' 

Perhaps a more affecting proof than any of all these, of 
the hold, as with 'hooks of steel' his young forerunner 
had upon Burns, is his quoting of a couplet from one of his 
English posthumous poems, within a few weeks of his 
death. It goes poignantly to one's heart even at this late 
day (April 1796 to George Thomson) : — 

r As much captured as a fish in the creel or basket. 
2 William Hamilton. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 13 

' I close my eyes in misery and open them without hope. I look on 
the vernal day and say with poor Fergusson — 

" Say, wherefore has an all- indulgent Heaven 
Light to the comfortless and wretched given?"' 



II. William Wordsworth. 

Not very long before his decease, the venerable and 
illustrious Poet thus wrote me : — 

' My dear Sir, — Both Ramsay and Fergusson are worthy of the 
labour you are bestowing upon them, and have received their respective 
tributes of applause from the highest authority, that of Robert Burns. 
You remember the passage — 



and that other — 



" Come forward, honest Allan, 
The teeth o' Time may gnaw Tantallan, 
But thou's forever;" 

" Ramsay and famous Fergusson 
Gied Forth and Tay a lift aboon." 



So that you see there is no call for any attempt from me to do honour 
to either of these distinguished writers. — Heartily wishing you success 
in your patriotic and laudable undertaking, I remain, my dear sir, 
faithfully yours, Wm. Wordsworth.' 

Again — 

1 You are right in supposing me to be well acquainted with 
Fergusson's Poems. His early death was a great loss to the Poetry of 
Scotland, and would have been a still greater had he not been followed 
by his mighty successor, Robert Burns, who as a Poet was greatly 
indebted to his predecessor' (Fergusson's Life and Works, 1851, pp. 
cxliii-iv, but now from the MSS in full). 

It was through reading Burns's fervent acknowledgment 
of his indebtedness to him, that Wordsworth — as he further 
informed me — was led to seek out a copy of Fergusson's 
Poems (Morison of Perth's, 1788-89). So that Fergusson 
shares the glory with Burns of the most heartfelt tribute 
ever paid to any poet by Wordsworth — always chary of 
his praise. 

' I mourned with thousands, but as one 
More deeply grieved ; for he was gone 
Whose light I hailed when first it shone 

And showed my youth, 
How verse may build a princely throne 
On humble truth,' 



i 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 

III. Thomas Carlyle. 

Elsewhere I shall be compelled to criticise hasty words 
on Ramsay and Fergusson of this greatest of recent Scots : 
all the more pleasure, therefore is it to me to be able to 
publish a characteristic letter addressed to myself while I 
was preparing the vol. of 1851 : — 

' Chelsea, 25 Nov. 

1 Dear Sir, — I am much afraid I shall not be able to assist you by 
any contribution than that of my good wishes, to your pious enterprise. 
I have not read Fergusson at all since the time of my boyhood ; neither 
has Ramsay ever in mature years been familiar to me except in parts. 
Yet I still very vividly remember Fergusson's best pieces, mainly those 
you mention, — Ode to a Bee, Braid Claith, Hallowfair, Leith Races, 
The Farmer's Ingle, — and should be very glad indeed to see any real 
elucidation of them or him if a faithful Editor and Biographer will give 
us such. Ramsay is farther off, is still more obscure ; in fact is becoming 
very cloudy in some of his features. Much enveloped as most things 
are apt to be at present in vague traditionary cant and twaddle of all 
kinds, words, words, words, which even for the utterers of them mean 
almost nothing ! I recommend to you the utmost rigour of accuracy 
both as to facts and opinions ; say nothing that you do not mean (who- 
ever else may mean it) with the whole weight that was given you or 
attainable by you. Perhaps a good portrait of Ramsay might be 
obtainable somewhere. The current one is surely other than good. 
The portrait of his old shop in the High Street, that at least is still to 
be had ; perhaps also at Leadhills the hut where he was born may still 
be in existence — at all events the site of it is sure to be. Any authentic 
particular, provided it be authentic and indisputable, is valuable. I 
should even hope there may be some better portrait of Fergusson 
procurable than the frightful madhouse one ; not a fair representation at 
all of the poor, high-soaring, deep-falling, gifted, and misguided young 
man. 

' With many wishes for yourself which are not good for much, let me 
add I have a regard to this matter. — I remain, yours truly, 

' T. Carlyle.' 

IV. Robert Louis Stevenson. 

In his Edinburgh : Picturesque Notes, Stevenson re- 
peatedly brings in Fergusson, with passionate laudation. I 
can only refer thereto (s.n.) the more readily because I 
have been favoured with an exceptionally striking letter 
from him on Fergusson, which was addressed to Mr. 
Craibe Angus, Glasgow. It needs to be read cum grano 
salis ; for its epithets, especially 'drunken' and 'vicious' 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 15 

toward himself as well as Fergusson, are much too strong 
and generalising. But such a tribute cannot be withheld for 
such blemishes, albeit I shall quote only choice bits that 
directly refer to Fergusson. 

After an infinitely touching allusion to his irreversible 
exile from Scotland, ' its birks and heather and burns,' he 
thus pays fealty to Fergusson : — 

'When your hand is in, will you remember our poor Edinburgh 
Robin ? Burns alone has been just to his promise : follow Burns. He 
knew best, he knew where to draw fish — from the poor, white-faced, 
drunken, vicious boy, who raved himself to death in the Edinburgh 
madhouse. Surely there is more to be gleaned about Fergusson, and 
surely it is high time the task was set about. 

' I may tell you (because your poet is not dead) something of how I 
feel. We are three Robins, who have touched the Scots lyre this last 
century. Well, the one is the world's. He did it, he came off; he i 
for ever ; but I, and the other, ah ! what bonds we have ! Born in the 
same city ; both sickly ; both vicious ; both pestered — one nearly to 
madness and one to the madhouse — with a damnatory creed ; both 
seeing the stars and the moon, and wearing shoe-leather on the same 
ancient stones, under the same pends {= courts), down the same closes, 
where our common ancestors clashed in their armour, rusty or bright. 
. . . He died in his acute, painful youth, and left the models of the 
great things that were to come ; and the man who came after outlived 
his green-sickness, and has faintly tried to parody his finished work. 

' If you will collect strays of Robert Fergusson, fish for material, 
collect any last re-echoing of gossip, command me to do what you 
prefer — to write the preface, to write the whole if you prefer ; anything 
so that another monument (after Burns's) be set up to my unhappy 
predecessor, on the causey of Auld Reekie. You will never know, nor 
will any man, how deep this feeling is. I believe Fergusson lives in 
me. I do. But "tell it not in Gath." Every man has these fanciful 
superstitions coming, going but yet enduring ; only most men are 
so wise (or the poet in them so dead) that they keep their follies for 
themselves. ' 

Continuing the subject in a subsequent letter, Stevenson 
pleads for a movement to erect a monument to Fergusson, 
and sheds bitter tears over his end. He says quaintly — 

'A more miserable ( = sorrowful) tragedy, the sun never shone upon, 
or (in consideration of our climate) I should rather say, refused to 
brighten.' 

If the witness of Robert Burns — William Wordsworth 
— Thomas Carlyle — and Robert Louis Stevenson do not 



16 FAMOUS SCOTS 

win acceptance of our claims — our high but modest claims 
— for Robert Fergusson, no apologia — using the Latin 
rather than the English form, in recollection of a royal 
misunderstanding of the term — will do so. To any — 
English or American or Scottish recalcitrants, I address the 
pungent reproof and reproach of Alexander Wilson in 
his ' Laurel Disputed, or the Merits of Allan Ramsay and 
Robert Fergusson contrasted' — 

' Whae'er can thae (o' mae I needna speak) 
Read tenty ower at his ain ingle-cheek, 
And no' find something glowan through his blood, 
That gars his een glower through a siller flood ; *■ 
May close the beuk, poor coof ! and lift his spoon, 
His heart's as hard's the tackets in his shoon.' 

(Works, 1870, i. 20, of Ramsay). 

Be it further remembered that Sir David Wilkie painted 
one of his most characteristic panels from ' The Farmer's 
Ingle,' and that a medallion of Fergusson's head has found 
a niche in the great Scott Monument in Edinburgh. 



CHAPTER II 

1 AN ELL OF GENEALOGY ' FERGUSSONS AND FORBESES 

' Traditional story 
Disclosed by the natives of dark Lochnagar.' — Byron. 

Heredity, in these Darwin - cum - Huxley days, is so 
universally accepted a factor of Nature and human nature, 
that it were uncritical to write any man's life that is held 
worthy of being written at all, without an endeavour to 
trace his lines of descent. If this suffice not as a good 
reason for our intended procedure, let these opening 
sentences from Andrew Lang's Life of J. G. Lockhart be 
pondered : — 

' " Every Scotsman has his pedigree," says Sir Walter in the auto- 
biographic fragment where he traces his own. The interest in our 
ancestors "without whose life we had not been," may be regarded as a 
foible, and was made a reproach both to Scott and his biographer. 
Scott was " anxious to realise his own ancestry to his imagination . . . 
whatever he had in himself he would fain have made out a hereditary 
claim for." I think also there is not wanting a domestic piety; and 
Science since Sir Walter's day has approved of his theory, that the 
Past of a race revives. For these reasons Scottish readers at least may 
pardon a genealogical sketch in this place. Or if they be unkind, 
we may say of Lockhart as he says in the case of Thomas Campbell, 
"he was a Scotsman, and of course his biographer begins with an ell 
of genealogy " ' (i. p. i). 

This ' ell ' is the more necessary in the case of Fergus- 
son, as this same Lockhart has haphazardly misrepresented 
the origins of both Allan Ramsay and our Poet, putting the 
matter thus — 

' Ramsay and Fergusson were both men of humble condition, the 
latter of the meanest* {Life of Burns, 1838, p. 122). 

If by ' humble condition ' impoverished circumstances 
only were intended, one might concede it, though it 



18 FAMOUS SCOTS 

demands a strenuous protest whenever and wherever the 
epithet ' mean ' or ' meanest ' is applied to ' honest 
poverty' — Burns's brave word. But Lockhart's argument 
is blunted unless descent be understood. Therefore I 
must recall that the supremest of all instances shows that 
it is unphilosophic to confound outwardly lowly environ- 
ment with mean or meanest lineage. With reference to 
Ramsay, he was ' bien,' i.e. well-to-do, from almost the 
outset, and never forgot or allowed others to forget his 
- lang descent ' from the ennobled Dalhousie Ramsays and 
maternally from the bluest of blue Scottish blood, the 
Douglases. But his link with them was shadowy — though, 
as with Edmund Spenser and the Althorp Spencers, his 
claim was graciously and pleasantly admitted — compared 
with the 'good birth' of Robert Fergusson, as shall 
speedily appear. 

Of the Fergussons and Fergusons, two living capable 
scholars and genealogists — James Ferguson, Esq., of 
Kinmundy, Advocate, Edinburgh, and the Rev. Robert 
Menzies Fergusson, M.A., of Logie — have published 
a monumental History and Biography in a goodly 
tome — not as too frequently in such books, a tomb — of 
considerably over six hundred closely-packed pages, in 
the following work — Records of the Clan and Name of 
Fergusson, Ferguson, and Fergus. Edited for the Clan 
Fergus[s]on Society. . . . Edinburgh : David Douglas, 
1895. Thither, I must refer all who wish to be fully in- 
formed on the many ' fair ladies and brave men ' of the 
name of Fergusson distributed over ' broad Scotland ' — 
so similarly the Jew imaginatively and idealisingly spoke of 
the least of all Lands. 

It were a hard task to so much as attempt to disentangle 
what Sir Walter calls ' the inextricable filaments of Scottish 
family relationship' of the manifold lines of the Fergussons, 
so as to relate our Poet with the much-marrying and in- 
termarrying cadets of the ' Clan.' Having had the good 
fortune to have ascertained the birthplace of his father, I 
feel free to decline the over-task, and to limit myself to 
a single parish and district in the far North, viz. Tarland, 
or as it is more widely named, Cromar — that Cromar 
which fills so large a space in Scottish history from the 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 19 

days of Robert Bruce on to the tumults of the Highland 
Clans, and forward to '15 and '45 — as has been picturesquely 
and memorably told in Deeside Tales ; or, Sketches of Me?i 
and Manners among the Peasafitry of Upper Deeside since 
1745 (1872). 

It was known before, and was stated accordingly in my 
1 85 1 Life of Fergusson, that his great-grandfather on his 
father's side was a clergyman of the Kirk of Scotland — the 
fact having been derived by all his early biographers from 
his family. But it was reserved to the too modest 
anonymous author (Rev. J. G. Michie, M.A., Dinnet) in 
the Deeside Tales to verify and localise the fact. I have 
also had the advantage of his more recent researches. 

There was only one known family of the name of 
Fergusson within the parish of Cromar. This family 
possessed the estate therein of Auchtererne (Watererne) 
from the reign of David 11. to that of James v., when it 
would seem that they ceased to be landed proprietors. 
The long-carried tradition is, that the last proprietor of 
Auchtererne was father of the Rev. Alexander Fergusson, — 
contracted by a local usage that still prevails into Ferris, 
not Gaelic for Fergusson, as the historians of the ' Clan ' 
supposed, — who became ultimately minister of the parish 
of Crathie. He, having been of the Auchtererne house, 
takes us back to Tarland or Cromar. Unfortunately, the 
Parish Register of the period has disappeared, or rather it 
never existed, if the account in Sir John Sinclair's Statis- 
tical Account is to be depended upon; for there we read as 
follows : — 

1 With regard to the population of the parishes, no distinct account 
can be given, as no register of births, deaths, or marriages has ever 
been or can be exactly kept in them, owing to the distance of several 
parts of the shire from the minister's residence ' (vi. 227). 

It is consequently out of our power to give birth or 
burial entries of the Fergussons of Tarland. But from 
other semi - accidentally preserved documents, we are not 
left wholly without a clue. There having been only the 
one family of Fergussons within the parish, it follows that 
these data belong to them. When the Rev. Alexander 
Fergusson migrated to Crathie, a son of his named William 
Fergusson remained in Cromar, and a jet of light is cast 



20 FAMOUS SCOTS 

on him by this circumstance, that he appears as a Wad- 
setter on the lands of the ' Laird ' of Skene, near Tarland. 
His name also occurs in a rental receipt-book which had 
belonged to a family of the name of Esson, who had at 
one time been tenants of the land of Skene. 

A ' wadset,' as denned in Bell's Law Dictionary (s.v.), is a 
conveyance of land in pledge, and is somewhat analogous to 
a mortgage, but in process of time a wadset assumed the 
form of a more absolute conveyance. William Fergusson 
must therefore have had — like his father, as we shall see 
anon — considerable spare monies. This William Fergusson 
had a son — Christian name unhappily not known — and he 
was father of William Fergusson, father of Robert Fergusson. 
By the burial-entry of our Poet's father — to be adduced 
in its place — we learn that he was born in Tarland, in 
1 7 14. The probabilities are that he was a younger or 
the youngest son of a numerous family — judging by his 
straitened circumstances and enforced early earning of his 
' daily bread.' 

Having thus ascertained the paternal family-tree, and 
discovered the traditional clerical great-grandfather, it is 
interesting at this late day to glean such slight notices as 
survive of him. 

Apart from present-day associations, and Her Majesty's 
leal-hearted adherence to our national Presbyterianism 
while resident within the parish, Crathie has a story worthy 
of fuller telling than I can afford. For in post-Reformation 
times its ' Manse ' became a centre of culture and en- 
lightenment in these remote and extensive regions of the 
Highlands. 

The settlement of the Rev. Alexander Fergusson as 
minister of Crathie is our first outstanding and fully-assured 
fact. That ' settlement ' took place ' about 1630 ' ; the exact 
date has not been traced. By all the well-preserved 
traditions of the district, it introduced a new era of social 
intercourse between the clergy and the laity, his own social 
position as son of the proprietor of Auchtererne making 
him equal with the gentry. He had married Christian 
Auchterlony, a local family-name of mark down to our 
own day. 

The incumbency of the Rev. Alexander Fergusson 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 21 

(1630? — 1668-70?) was eventful, but cannot have been 
always pleasant to those who lived through it. He all 
along appears as a man of ' substance '; e.g. in the Miscellany 
of the Spalding Club (vol. iii. p. 138), from the ' Book of 
the Annualrentaris and Wadsetters' (1633), we rea -d of 
various considerable loans. Onward the same Miscellany 
presents him as still a prosperous man. This continued for 
fully seven years, during which the same record shows he 
must have exercised much influence for good in and beyond 
his parish, as a man of affairs. But evil times were at 
hand. The Civil War broke out. The district was divided 
in its politics. The minister was necessarily a Covenanter, 
and suffered severely at the hands of the opposite party, 
who were the more numerous, and notoriously rapacious. 
His own means had been largely invested mostly in the 
hands of Lowland proprietors, but he had also formed 
financial relations with many of the small ' lairds ' around 
him, whose ruin in the strife had pressed hard upon him. 
An event, however, connected him most intimately with 
one of the parties, viz. the marriage of his daughter Agnes 
to James Farquharson of Inverey — the head of a powerful 
sept of his ' Clan.' Farquharson was a Protestant, and like 
the great Montrose, at first a Covenanter. While this con- 
tinued, the minister had in his son-in-law a powerful pro- 
tector ; but the case was altered when Montrose became a 
Royalist and Inverey joined his unfurled standard. The 
good clergyman's 'goods and chattels' now became the prey 
of the bands of Highlanders that scoured the country, and 
his losses were heavy. For the reparation of these he was 
recommended to Parliament 30th July 1649, and such was 
the strength of his case and the influence of his friends 
that an Act was passed in his favour the following day, 
and continued 21st October 1652 — not 1662, as stated in 
Dr. Hew Scott's Fasti Ecclesice Scoticanaz (s.tl). He survived 
the Restoration several years ; and, though singularly enough 
the exact date of his death is apparently nowhere recorded, 
it probably occurred about 1670, as in the following year 
his widow makes attestation of his estate. 

Having thus recounted the facts of Robert Fergusson's 
paternal descent, I hold it as in the last degree interesting to 
be able to link him with a minister of the gospel and so com- 



22 FAMOUS SCOTS 

manding a type of man. I value the relationship much more 
than the mere ''gentle'' blood of the house of Auchtererne. 
I regard it as something higher than merely titular rank, 
primary or collateral through the Farquharsons. Nor can 
I leave it unreckoned in thinking-out the elements that 
went to shape and colour the sadly-mingled life of the great- 
grandson of the minister of Crathie. 1 

Maternally, Fergusson's descent was at least equal to his 
paternal. I have been favoured with abundant genealogical 
MSS. bearing on this. From the mass, I select a paper 
headed ' Descent from John Forbes, 3rd son of Walter 
Forbes, 9th laird of Tolquhon and Thanistone, by Jane, 
sister of the present Lord Forbes of Pitsligo, whom he 
married in 1627.' 

The John Forbes who heads this document stood for 
a time, through the predecease of his immediate elder 
brother, Thomas Forbes of Anchry, Advocate, Edin- 
burgh, heir - presumptive to the estate. But this pro- 
spective succession was cut off by his eldest brother, Sir 
Alexander Forbes, marrying and having a family. John 
Forbes resided at Edinbanchory, near the site of the House 
of Bruce, in the parish of Auchendeir. He followed no 
profession, but lived as ' an old Scottish gentleman all of 
the olden time.' He was enabled to do so from his father 
having left him a life-annuity — apparently a generous one 
— from the estate of Tolquhon. He married — circa 1640 — 
Margaret Duguid, daughter of the laird of Auchinhove in 
the parish of Lumphanan — not far from where Macbeth was 
slain (Statistical Accoimt). By her he had an only son, 
Duncan, who is designated of ' Little Kildrummie.' This 
Duncan Forbes emerges in the ' List of the Pollable 
Persons within the Shire of Aberdeen, 1696' (2 vols. 4to, 
1844, i. 497, 499). He rented the farms of Templeton, 
Hillockhead, and Wellhead of Kildrummy. He married on 
31st December 1668 Jeane Glasse — of whom nothing has 
been transmitted. He died on 14th April 1701. 

Duncan Forbes was succeeded by his son John, who 
entered on all his father's farms. This John Forbes had 

1 Murdoch M'Lennan, author of the racy song of Sheriffmuir, ' They 
ran and we ran,' was also minister of Crathie, and Adam Fergusson, 
M.A., father of the Professor ; and there are other names of mark. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 23 

three sons and four daughters. We are concerned only 
with two — a son John, born 24th January 1680 ; a daughter 
Sophia, born 10th April 1675. 

So far this MS. is in agreement with other family 
papers, but it goes on to state an impossible marriage of 
the paternal John Forbes, as follows : ' He married Sophia 
Ker, daughter of Andrew Ker, minister of Rathen in Moray- 
shire.' 

I call this an impossible marriage, because we find from 
the Fasti Ecclesice Scotica?ix (s.n.) that the Rev. Andrew Ker, 
M.A., of Rathen, was only born in 1680, and so could not 
possibly have had a marriageable daughter at the date. It is 
a simple slip of memory, or of the scribe's pen. Sophia 
Ker was a sister, not daughter, of the Rev. Andrew Ker 
of Rathen, and both were the children of Alexander Ker, 
1 gentleman ' and ' tenant ' of Drumnahoove, which it may 
be noted immediately adjoins Templeton. This Alexander 
Ker, again, was son, or possibly grandson, of the Rev. 
Andrew Ker, or Car, minister of Glenbucket. An entry 
in the Pollbook of 1696 concerning this Alexander Ker, 
thus runs : ' Alexander Ker, tennant ther and Anna Gordon 
his spouse : Alexander, James, and Arthur Ker, his sons : 
Sophia, Elizabeth, and Margaret, his daughters.' 

We are thus led up to a clerical descent of Robert Fergus- 
son maternally as well as paternally. Both great-grandfathers 
were clergymen of the Kirk of Scotland. 

Andrew Ker, minister of Rathen and Glenbucket, and 
Alexander Fergusson of Crathie were contemporary. It is 
also noteworthy that the fortunes and misfortunes of the 
two families were very similar. 

Sophia Ker, then, daughter of Alexander Ker 'gentle- 
man,' married John Forbes 'gentleman' of Templeton 
Kildrummy, in 1704. 

The farm-steading of Templeton, in which John Forbes 
and Sophia Ker resided, was burnt to the ground — whether 
by accident or design was never fully ascertained — in 1 717, 
with all that it contained, including of course the family 
muniments — a calamity that, perhaps, explains the foregoing 
blunder. 

John Forbes had by his wife three sons and four 
daughters, exactly like a before-noticed John Forbes. We 



24 FAMOUS SCOTS 

again have only to do with two of these sons and two of the 
daughters. The two sons were — John, born 9th August 1711; 
Hary, born 10th May 17 16, — the latter is here named 
because ' Hary ' — so spelled — was revived in the Poet's 
family. The two daughters were — Barbara, born 28th June 
1709 ; Elizabeth, born 6th March 17 14, — the former again 
named because similarly revived, and the latter as the 
goal of our search. For Elizabeth Forbes became wife of 
William Fergusson of Tarland, and so mother of Robert 
Fergusson. 

We shall have repeated occasion, unhappily, to return on 
the one son who survived, John Forbes, brother of Elizabeth, 
and so maternal uncle of the Poet. Meanwhile I note that 
the Forbes MSS. inform us that, besides his inherited farms 
enumerated, he occupied the farm of Forresterhill in the 
parish of Meldrum, co. of Aberdeen. Not only so, but 
that he was also 'factor' for Mr. Urquhart of Meldrum 
and for various other extensive landed proprietors in that 
district. 1 

Reverting to the Kers, as I have chanced on a very out- 
spoken vernacular song by James Ker, who is believed to 
have been brother of Sophia Ker, it seems expedient to 
reproduce it. I came upon it while examining the David 
Herd MSS. in the British Museum (Additional MSS. 
22312, f. 20). 

1 I place here these further details concerning John Forbes. His 
first wife was Jane or Jean Dalrymple, a ward of the then Lord 
Findlater ; and after her death, without leaving a family, he married, 
secondly, Isabella, daughter of Bailie James Simpson, younger of 
Little Folia and merchant in Old Meldrum. By this marriage he 
had six sons and five daughters ; but it needs not that we occupy much- 
needed space with their names, save that it may be recalled that a 
daughter Jean — born 4th October 1772 — married John Nichol, merchant 
and farmer, Huntly Hill, by whom she had a family, and among them 
John Nichol, LL.D., Professor of Astronomy in the University of 
Glasgow, and father of his still more brilliant son, Professor John 
Nichol. I cannot withhold adding that the ' greatly beloved 5 and richly 
dowered Professor Edward Forbes was of the family of Forbes of 
Fenzies, through another son, who because of Rebellion entanglements 
fugitively migrated to the Isle of Man {Life of Edward Forbes, by Wilson 
and Geikie). These data on John Forbes have been mainly drawn from 
family MSS., and from information communicated by the late Mr. Keith 
Forbes, Solicitor, Peterhead. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 25 

Song wrote by Mr. James Kerr of Kildrummy on being 
Desired to Marry a Rich Old Woman. 

Tune, ' Tweedside. ' 

' My father wad hae me to wed 
A woman decrepit and old ; 
They'll come nane like her to my bed, 
Though she had a tun fu' o' gold. 

I value nae riches at a' ; 

There's ae thing I look to above ; 
Although my poor fortune be sma', 

Yet I'll hae the lassie I love. 

A' sordid low ends I do hate ; 

True love maun be free and unforc'd ; 
Though poverty should be my fate, 

I'll ne'er frae my choice be divorc'd.' 

Another Kerr or Carr figures in a snatch of song that 
the Rev. Andrew Christie remembers his mother singing 
as a cradle lullaby — 

' Hey my Andrew Carr ! 

Hey my Andrew Carr ! 
What care I for a' the warld 
Gin I hae Andro Carr ? ' 

An inevitable suggestion from these two songs is that 
Robert Fergusson as a Poet owed something besides his 
clerical heritage to his paternal and maternal kin. There 
are these Kers, and his own father is known to have indulged 
himself in his early years in writing satirical and humorous 
poems on local characters, though Bishop Gleig in Supple- 
ment of the Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that ' wiser 
than his son,' he gave up the indulgence ! Poor bishop ! 

Sufficient has been furnished to demonstrate that the 
blood of Robert Fergusson was very far from being ' mean,' 
much less, in Lockhart's phrase, ' of the meanest.' Nor is 
it mere fancy that we shall find traits of character, of 
temperament, of conduct, and even correspondency of 
circumstance coming to him from his ancestry. He was 
well-born, e.g., compared with Robert Burns. 



CHAPTER III 

PARENTAGE — BIRTH BIRTHPLACE — CHILDHOOD 

' Frae Corgarf to Craigievar ; 
The royal burgh of Aberdene.' 

Battle of Harlaw. 

1 Poortith cauld.' — Burns. 

We have seen that William Fergusson of Tarland married 
Elizabeth Forbes, youngest daughter of John Forbes and 
Sophia Ker his wife (c. ii.). As a younger son of the son 
of the ' Wadsetter ' of the lands of Skene, we have also seen 
he must have been socially on an equality with his wife's 
family. But the fact that he was a younger son holds in it 
the secret of two things : first, that he had to be ' bound 
apprentice ' to a merchant in Aberdeen — a fact stated by all 
his son's biographers ; second, that he appears to have been 
straitened in his worldly circumstances throughout. Both 
husband and wife were in their twenty-seventh year — an age 
which in the fair sex was riskily near the ' old maid,' what her 
sisters came to be. 

It will be found in the sequel, in relation to the most 
pathetic incident in our Poet's career, that almost certainly 
the ' merchant ' to whom he is said to have been ' bound ' 
was Dean of Guild Burnett ; and that by ' merchant ' we 
are to understand an exporter and importer of goods of the 
most miscellaneous character, William Fergusson's func- 
tion being 'clerking.' His beautiful handwriting — various 
examples of which I have seen — and his mathematical- 
arithmetical qualifications and likings, attest that he had 
received a sound education, as education then was. 

Hugh Miller, in his Scottish Merchant of the Eighteenth 
Century, gives vivid insight into the ' merchanting ' of the 
type wherein William Fergusson was engaged, and prepares 

26 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 27 

us for the readiness and ease with which he afterwards 
entered on any opening that offered. He must have been 
emphatically a ' handy ' man. 

The date of this marriage can only be approximately 
arrived at, viz. 1741. I fix on 1741, because their first- 
born child, Hary, — afterwards a fine-hearted, adventurous 
fellow and a capital letter-writer, as may be seen in my vol. 
of 185 1, — was born in 1742. Barbara, a second daughter, 
was born in 1744 ; John — a third family name maternally' — 
born in 1746, died in infancy. From an Inverarity Memor- 
andum, I learn these three were born 'near Tarland.' 

When William Fergusson first came to Aberdeen is not 
known, but it seems manifest that as in 1741 he was — as 
above — in his twenty-seventh year, he must long prior to 
his marriage have passed from apprenticeship and been 
installed as full ' clerk.' 

'About 1746' is the somewhat loose year-date assigned 
to the surcease of his employment with the Aberdeen 
' merchant ' (called ' tradesman ' by Alexander Chalmers, 
s.n. Biog. Diet.). That ending has been assigned to the 
fulfilment of his ' bond ' of apprenticeship ; but I think I 
am right in stating that it was not so. Dean of Guild 
Burnett died in 1748; and, as William Fergusson's migra- 
tion to Edinburgh is always said by his son's biographers to 
have been caused by the death of his employer, the 
probabilities are that his permanent removal at anyrate 
belonged to 1748, rather than to 'about 1746.' 

Be all this as it may, William Fergusson and his family 
migrated to Edinburgh. 

He had only been in the capital three days when, from 
the excellent ' character ' which he brought with him from 
the North, he obtained employment as ' clerk ' with Mr. 
Robert Baillie, who was then the only 'haberdasher' in 
all Edinburgh ! Significantly, however, he was not engaged, 
remarks Alexander Campbell, ' without the precaution of 
security having been given that he was of good principles ' 
{Introduction to History of Scottish Poetry, p. 289). 

The period (1746-48) reminds us that the Rebellion 
of '45 took a while to ebb, and even in ebbing left a 
swell liable to burst. 

There would be no difficulty in this instance ; as, like the 



28 FAMOUS SCOTS 

minister of Crathie, his grandfather, William Fergusson was 
too level-headed a man to have been led away by the 
ignis fatuus glamour of ' bonnie Prince Charlie.' He had 
adhered to the not ' bonnie ' House of Hanover. 

The Mr. Baillie with whom our Poet's father found 
speedy employment was a noticeable man and citizen of 
Edinburgh in his day. This, however, is hardly the place 
to chronicle his chequered story. Proof upon proof of his 
financial troubles have been before me in a multitude of 
bonds granted by him ' for execution.' I refer to these, 
because the whole are in William Fergusson's handwriting 
and witnessed by him. 

His ' clerk,' I fear, would speedily share and suffer from Mr. 
Baillie's altered circumstances. But one fact it is important 
to put in the forefront and accentuate, viz. that William 
Fergusson remained 'clerk' with Mr. Baillie up to 18th 
December 1754 at least. Amongst the deeds already 
mentioned in his handwriting are certain of 1754 (as earlier) 
wherein he is still designated his ' clerk.' 

From 'about 1746 ' or ' 1748,' then, William Fergusson 
was 'clerk' and book-keeper — self-evidently most confidential 
— to Mr. Robert Baillie. It was a very humble and poorly- 
paid situation that was thus obtained and retained. Only 
such a ' managing ' housewife and mother as all accounts 
agree Elizabeth Fergusson was, could have kept the wolf 
Poverty from their door. 

In the outset, the household consisted of husband and 
wife and — as we saw — three little children, all to be fed 
and clad. 

Their lowly roof-tree was a ' small old house, much smaller 
than the rest,' in the Cap-and-Feather Close. This was a 
confined alley, but memorable in the story of the 

' Grey metropolis of the North.' x 

The Cap-and-Feather Close stood immediately above the 
present Halkerston's Wynd. There, on 5 th September 
1750, Robert Fergusson was born. This I am enabled, 

1 Tennyson robbed Stirling of 'grey 'that Sir Walter had given it. 
' Grey Stirling with her towers and town ' {Lady of the Lake, v. xviii. ), 
and displaced his designation of Edinburgh as ' Empress of the North ' 
(Intr. ALarmion, c. v.). 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 29 

for the first time, to make absolutely certain by his baptismal 
entry in the Canongate Parish Register — an entry that 
perfunctory officials deprived all former biographers of, but 
which the Rev. Walter Macleod, M.A., of the Register 
House, recovered for me, as follows : — 

' 1750. Sept. 5. To William Fergusson, clerk to bailie Robert 
Baillie, merchant in the N. K. P., and Elizabeth Forbes his spouse, 
a son named Robert : born same day. ' 

The exceptionally speedy baptism suggests delicacy of the 
infant, as in the case of great Dr. Samuel Johnson, who, it 
will be remembered, was born and baptized on the same 
day. 

This entry clears away, once for all, the erroneous year- 
date 1 75 1, from Burns's memorial-stone inscription onward. 

'There are,' says Lord Jeffrey of himself, 'very few persons the 
precise spot of whose nativity it is worth while taking much pains to 
fix ' {Life by Lord Cockbum, i. i). 

I venture to assume that Robert Fergusson is of the 
1 very few ' for whom the claim may be made. Therefore, 
I gladly avail myself of Sir Daniel Wilson's sympathetic 
and painstaking description of the spot : — 

' To the East . . . the first step in the great undertaking of 
building the North Bridge, demolished some of the old "lands" of 
the High Street, and among the rest, the Cap-and-Feather Close, a 
short alley which stood immediately above Halkerston's Wynd. The 
"lands" that formed the east side of this close still remain in North 
Bridge Street, presenting doubtless to the eye of every tasteful reformer 
offensive blemishes in the modern thoroughfare ; yet this unpicturesque 
locality has peculiar claims on the interest of every lover of Scottish 
poetiy ; for here on the 5th September 1750, the gifted child of genius, 
Robert Fergusson, was born. The precise site of his father's dwelling is 
unknown, but now that it has been transformed by the indiscriminating 
hands of modern improvers, this description may suffice to suggest to 
some, as they pass along that crowded thoroughfare, such thoughts as 
the dwellers in cities are most careless to encourage. ' 

There is an additional footnote — 

1 In Edgar's map, the close is shown extending no farther than in 
a line with Milne's Court, so that the whole of the east side still 
remains, including, it may be, the poet's birthplace ' {Memorials of 
Edinburgh in the Olden Time, ii. 22). 

The Cap-and-Feather Close was a malodorous birthplace. 
Nevertheless, in 1750 onward through another decade and 



30 FAMOUS SCOTS 

longer, there were to be seen in the close and neighbour- 
hood high-titled ladies and their lords. 

The narrow circumstances of the family, from 1746-48 
forward, were not lightened in 1750 when Robert, after an 
interval of four or five years, added a fourth mouth. 

A letter from William Fergusson to his brother-in-law, 
which it was our rare luck to recover along with others 
equally important in our vol. of 1851, yields us several 
noticeable facts. As at this long after-day revealing the 
interior economy (in a double sense) of the 'small old 
house ' in the Cap-and-Feather Close, this letter is of the 
deepest interest. I make room for it in full, and simply note 
that the spelling of certain words is that of the period : — 

William Fergusson to Mr John Forbes of Roundlichnot. 

' Edinburgh, jgth December 1751. 

' Sir, — Your favours of 15th I duly received and am glade thereby 
to learn that you and Mrs. Forbes are well. You take no notice 
which of the two ways I proposed was most convenient with respect to 
reimbursing you for value of the meall. Meantime your correspondent 
at Aberdeen may be advised to cask yr about 3 bolls newest miln'd 
meall. Ship it on board the first boat from that place for Lieth 
[Leith], marked " R. Baillie, Edinburgh," by which it will be brought 
to Edinburgh at sight, and give me an opportunity of paying freight, 
shore-dues, and cartage myself, and upon sight of price of meall, cask, 
couperage, shipping, &c. , shall order your money in the way seems most 
agreeable. 

' As to my situation, it is same as formerly, and can't propose to make 
any advance on my wages, with my present master. It's not impossible 
to find more encouragement in the place, but my loss is want either of 
interest [influence] or acquaintances to recommend me ; and had I not 
continued my family in the country until I furnished a room and saved 
£<) over, I could not [have] had subsistence, as you'll see by an abstract 
of last year's expences. 

' I have sometimes some shillings when I pay money away to persons 
on my master's account. Writes at spare hours to some acquaintances, 
for which gets complements, either a cheese, a ham, a cap or frock to 
some of the little ones ; and particularly I have the charge of posting 
up a dealer's books, which can be expede in six of my spare hours in 
the week, for which I have 40s. sterling yearly : last summer, in the 
mornings, I wrote eight quire of papper at a penny a page, for which 
I'm to get £3> m 4** m 

1 My wife joins in her love to you, Mrs. Forbes, and sister when you 
see her. Rob, the young one, is a thriving boy. Harry is well- 
advanced in his Latine, exponing Ovid, M. and C. Nepos. Babie 
[ = Barbara] has been tender of late, but now thought better. 

' However much you have reason to think I have been on the 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 



3i 



ceremony in not writing so oft as you might have expected, believe 
me no emergency happening in the course of my situation made me the 
more easy. Shall be glade to know if I could in the least be usefull 
to you here, or if [you] had ever any business in the place that might 
fall under my care, the same should be negotiat with all expedition. 

' Grain is now on the falling here, having last Friday sold 2od. p. boll 
cheaper at Haddington than day before. Meall sold here last week 
at 1 2d. and n^d. p. peck: sells this week at lid. — 
aff e . brother, and most hub 1 , serv 1 ., 

• Will. 

' Abstract of Expences, Anno 1751 

House rent 

Coals 

Candles . 

Bread 

Milk 

Flesh and fish 

Salt, greens, and barley 

* * * [torn away with wafer] 

Washing .... 

Quarter-payments for children, etc. 



I am, S 


r, your 


Fergusson. 


;£l IO 





2 12 





O 19 

4 6 


6 
8 


2 4 

3 6 
8 


5 
8 


1 10 


4 


13 





1 15 






£19 5 9 i 
' N.B. — 4s. 2^d. and chance for shoes, shirts, clothes, &c.' 

Though William and Elizabeth Fergusson's children 
were thus of the Poor, the ' tenty ' reader of the foregoing 
letter will have taken note of an especially Scottish, and 
especially creditable Scottish, characteristic, viz. that their 
parents, out of their little income, contrived to provide for 
the early and thorough education of their children, girls as 
well as boys. In the light, or rather shadow of such an 
1 abstract of expences ' as reveals a sum total of annual 
income under ^20, it makes one justly proud of one's 
country and countrymen to read of the eldest boy, then in 
his ninth year — ' Harry is well advanced in his Latin,' and 
actually 5 s. more than a year's rent of their home being 
paid out in 'quarter-payments for children.' 

It ever has been the glory of Scotland that her humblest 
peasantry and 'common people' — name of honour — 
equally with the higher, have valued the John Knox- 
established Parish Schools and * ettled 1 at something beyond 
them for their children. 

One is pleased to learn incidentally from the home-letter 



32 FAMOUS SCOTS 

that the family had been in the 'country.' Perhaps this 
accounts for the good report of ' Rob ' the l young one ' 
being still in 1751 ( a thriving boy' The thriving proved 
to be shortlived. 

In the considerable ' laying in ' of ' newest miln'd meall ' 
we have a key to the Poet's after-praise of the national 
staff of life, oatmeal, in his ' Farmer's Ingle.' Robert 
Fergusson's heart, as did Burns's, went into his panegyric. 
But, before going from this point of our Poet's youthful 
nurture on ' parr itch, chief 0' Scotia's food,' I must reassert 
its value as food. Nor can I better do this than through 
the inestimable Law Lyrics, where its praises are sung in 
such sort as should have gladdened the two Roberts — ■ 

' For makin' flesh an' buildin' banes 
There ne'er was siccan food for weans ; 
It knits their muscles steeve as stanes, 

An' teuch as brasses ; 
Fills hooses fu' o' boys wi' brains 
An' rosy lasses.' 

That on 19th December 1 75 1, or about a year and three 
months after his birth, Fergusson was a ' thriving boy ' adds 
pathos to the all-too-soon further glimpse we get of him 
as ' extremely delicate ' through his after-infancy. Alexander 
Campbell, Dr. David Irving, and Thomas Sommers unite 
in stating that he was ' of a remarkably delicate constitu- 
tion ' ; and, ' while wider the influence of infantile diseases, 
very freque?itly in a very weakly state,' — a circumstance 
(observes the first) that peculiarly e?ideared him to his 
mother' Be it recalled that Stevenson found kinship with 
Fergusson herein. 

In 1754 — Robert's fourth year, and when another had 
been added, Margaret, in 1753 — William Fergusson was 
over-persuaded to leave the service of Mr. Robert Baillie, 
by a promise of increased emolument made him by a Mr. 
Hope of Midhope, some distance from Edinburgh. This 
must have been in the closing weeks of December 1754, as 
shown by the deed before referred to. The change was an 
unfortunate one. A second letter from our priceless 
Inverarity collection, which was likewise addressed to his 
brother-in-law, makes it clear that the removal to Midhope 
was calamitous, and indicates sorrowfully to us a continuous 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 33 

hard struggle for bare subsistence — much again as Robert 
Burns's father had to make almost contemporaneously. 
This letter will speak for itself, and needs to be heard : — 

William Fergusson to Mr. John Forbes of Roundlichnot. 

' Midhope, ijt/i February 1755. 

'Dear Brother, — After receipt of yours of 16th December last, I 
went in to Edinburgh in consequence of a bargain with Mr. Hope, and 
was a fortnight extremely busy in settling accounts for and with Mr. 
Baillie, and we parted exceeding good friends ; and ever since my 
return here, have been exceedingly hurried, otherways I would have 
wrote you ere now. 

' As to Mr. Hope's business, I'm determined to have nothing to do 
with either him or it either, after Martinmas. I wish it may be in my 
power to stay till then : last half-year he chang'd no less than six clerks. 
He is a most insulting tyrant. In short, he is quite destitute of the 
most, if not all the social virtues ; and altho' the neighbourhood all 
agree that he behaves with more decency to me than any he ever had 
before, yet he is so implacable in every respect, that I'm weary of my 
life, and will be unhappy until the expiration of our term. 

1 The gentlewoman that recommended me to Lady Mary Deskford is 
Miss Billy Fraser, Milliner in Edinburgh, who I suppose is a niece of 
the late Collonell Ogilvie's. I make no doubt but you'll take the 
opportunity if you find it favourable when Lord Deskford is in the 
North, as I also hope Mr. Morison will do, to speak [to] his Lord- 
ship on my account, as this place is intollerable, and that my family 
requires my being in constant business. You may be sure that had this 
place been any way agreeable, I would not have hesitate about settling 
my family in this countrey ; but it is better they stay in Edinburgh, as I 
hope to be with them myself nine months hence, if spared. 

' You certainly have interpret my last wrong, when you write that I 
talk'd lightly of £1$. I know the value of money better than that ; 
and shall use all possible means to keep myself in some business or 
other, altho' the present has but a dire aspect. Shall be glade to hear 
more frequently from you now while under this so arbitrary jurisdiction, 
because to hear of friends' welfare will contribute much to lighten the 
burden. Complements to Mrs. Forbes and Sister. — I am, dear Brother, 
your most affectionate brother and humble servant, 

'Will. Fergusson.' 

The ' Mr. Hope ' of Midhope, which neighbours Hopetoun 
House, here referred to, is known to have been of the worst 
type of convivial 'lairds,' though a scion of the noble 
Hopetoun family. I could adduce a good deal to confirm 
William Fergusson's bitter description of him ; but I have 
elected not to revive his unsavoury memory. I simply 
recall his name — Archibald Hope of Rankeillor, son of Sir 
Thomas Hope, Bart., of Craighall. 

3 



34 FAMOUS SCOTS 

One can still feel how gloom must have settled down over 
Midhope and the ' little old house ' in the Cap-and-Feather 
Close under so 'arbitrary jurisdiction,' as doors of hoped- 
for opportunity closed with a clang. The nine months' 
continuance enforcedly at Midhope must have been 
extremely trying for this good man, and equally wearying 
and wearing for the wife and mother in Edinburgh. 

William Fergusson left Mr. Hope, as anticipated, at 
Martinmas 1755. But he was not — as has been said — 
'thrown upon the world.' Fortunately, a company of 
upholsterers — Messrs. Wardrope & Peat — of Carrubber's 
Close, Edinburgh, who required an experienced accountant, 
had applied to him. Evidently they had done so while he 
was still at Midhope, so that the earlier biographers were 
mistaken. The truth is that save in the matter of wages or 
income, Mr. Fergusson was never of the poorest, or out of 
employment. 

Then even as to the ^20 and ^25 per annum, it must 
be kept in recollection that Scotland in general, and 
Edinburgh in particular, were without ' openings ' such as 
now abound. It is almost grotesque to read up the 
statistics of trade and commerce of the period, and of the 
narrowness of professional, legal, educational, and clerical 
incomes. So that William Fergusson's was really no 
exceptional case. It took Scotland well-nigh a century to 
recover from the national losses by the Union, with English 
taxation — malt and salt taxes, being purely English — thence- 
forward transferred to it, and fully the same term of years 
to overcome the destruction of her then chief industries, 
and the loss of the Parliament and Court, and to enter 
on her subsequent splendid agricultural, manufacturing, and 
commercial enterprises that have placed her abreast of 
England. 

Another determining factor must not be lost sight of — that 
William Fergusson was a man of principle, of old-fashioned 
rectitude, and who would not fall in with ' shady ' ways of 
earning a living. 

A fourth letter, which will also be found in my 1851 
volume, like the other addressed to his brother-in-law, who 
was then ' factor ' on the estate of Meldrum, describes with 
much modesty, and not without touches of wistfulness, his 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 35 

arduous and poorly recompensed duties, his prospects and 
anxieties. I can here quote only one sentence : ' My wife 
has had a web for several months on the stocks, which I 
hope will soon be ready for launching.' 

The picture of ' thrift industrious ' of ' Grannie ' in ' The 
Farmer's Ingle ' held recollections of home in the Poet. 

We must not think only of the smallness or poorness of 
Robert Fergusson's childhood and boyhood's home. It was 
a home, not a house merely. And, to the honour of such 
lowly homes, let it never be forgotten that the testimony 
of John Murdoch concerning the if possible still humbler 
dwelling of the Burnses thus ran — 

' In this mean cottage of which I was at times an inhabitant, I really 
believe there dwelt a larger portion of content than in any palace in 
Europe' (Hamilton Paul's Burns, p. 7). 

But all this notwithstanding, I shall be constrained later 
to return on John Forbes, Esq., of Templeton, Wellhead, 
Kildrummy, Forrester-hill, and four factorships, and take up 
a parable and with Robert Burns almost ' curse the whin- 
stane heart ' that so failed in duty to a sister, and such a 
sister. 

William Fergusson had pleaded again for Lord Deskford's 
' interest,' in order to secure for him some post in the 
'Customs,' 'anything above a tidesman.' Nothing came 
of it. But this letter had only been despatched a few 
days when he obtained a much more congenial, though 
not greatly more remunerative, situation as ' clerk ' with a 
namesake and a distant relative — Walter Fergusson, Esq., 
Writer, Edinburgh. Henceforward he described himself, and 
was described by his employer, and others, as a ' Writer.' 

This usage demands a word of explanation. The term 
' Writer ' never has had any precise legal signification. It 
seems to have come into use in Scotland after the Reforma- 
tion, very much to express the legal variety of ' clerk ' in 
a lawyer's office. In 16th and 17th century writs it is often 
found applied to men who were in the employment of 
another person, and the appropriation of it to those in 
legal business on their own account must have been gradual. 
Everyone knows ' Gibbie Glossin the Writer ' in Guy 
Manner ing, and the scorn for him of Scott the 'advocate.' 



36 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



The clerkship with Walter Fergusson was held for 
upwards of six years, and by another fortunate find by 
J. Maitland Thomson, Esq., M.A., Advocate, Edinburgh, I 
am enabled to give here the closing clause of a deed, as 
follows, written by William Fergusson : — 

' In Witness whereof WE have subscribed these Presents 
Written by William Fergusson Writer in Edinburgh At 
Edinburgh the Fifth day of March Seventeen hundred and 
Sixty three Years. In presence of these Witnesses Mr. 
Anthony Fergusson Merchant in Edinburgh and the said 
William Fergusson. Wa : Ferguson. Jas. Walker. 

Anthony Ferguson Witness. 

Will : Fergusson Witness. 

I am glad to have it in my power to place here a care- 
ful facsimile of William Fergusson's autograph, to show 
his educated and fine ' Roman hand.' 




CHAPTER IV 

SCHOOLING AND SCHOOLS — FAMILY LIGHTS AND SHADOWS- 
VISIT TO THE NORTH 

' Edinburgh ! 
Your rantin' High Schule yard — 
The jib, the lick, the roguish trick.' 

Lady Nairne {Fareweel, Edinburgh). 

Robert Fergusson in 1756, when his father, as we saw in 
c. iii.j passed from Carrubber's Close upholstery wareroom 
into the service as ' clerk ' and ' Writer ' of his namesake, 
Walter Ferguson, Esq., was in his sixth year. His eldest 
brother, Hary, had been put to school somewhat before that 
age ; and, as his father proudly reported to his brother-in- 
law, was in his ninth year well advanced in his Latin. His 
younger brother must follow suit. 

Robert was now rather beyond the usual Scottish age for 
first going to school, solely from early delicacy of health. 
But he had had the inestimable advantage of having been 
prepared by his good mother, who taught him his letters 
and much more besides. 

I have seen his first school-book. It was a small penny 
pamphlet of eight pages. The first page had the alphabet 
or A B C in large distinct lettering, varied in successive 
lines. On another page, a few letters were brought together 
as monosyllables, ab, ba, etc. Then followed, I remember, 
certain of the Questions and Answers of the Presbyterian 
Shorter Catechism, which had to be committed to memory. 
Then again followed a selection from the Book of Proverbs 
and the Lord's Prayer. I think, too, that Master Robert's 
copy had a fragment of pellucid horn in the middle, for pro- 
tection from soiled or sticky forefinger and thumb. I also 
think that on one page Hary had written his name cross-wise 

37 



38 FAMOUS SCOTS 

— showing careful preservation of their school-books for 
after-comers. Ill-used school-books reveal lacking oversight. 

Multitudes of Scots, of this later day, at home and all over 
our empire, are neither afraid nor ashamed to own their 
indebtedness to just such teaching and training as I have 
described. They are shallow people, be they cleric or laic, 
who sneer and jest at the Shorter Catechism and Confession 
of Faith of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. 

When Robert was a mere child, an anecdote is told of 
him that shows his sensibility and the intelligence with which 
he read. One day, he burst in upon his mother, and, 
sobbing all the while, implored her to whip him ; and in 
explanation of this astonishing request cried, ' Oh, mother ! 
mother ! he that spareth the rod, hateth the child,' — fetch- 
ing the words, of course, from Proverbs xviii. 24. 

Mr. Alexander Gordon (in his brilliant Study of Fer- 
gusson) has strangely queried whether young Robert was 
not poking fun at his godly mother in the preceding story. 
But the emotion was too genuine to be so fantastically 
misinterpreted (Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 277, p. 379). 

1 Gleg at the uptak] the little fireside pupil soon got be- 
yond maternal capacity to instruct. Accordingly, Robert is 
found in 1756 at a private or adventure school. His first 
teacher therein was a Mr. Philp, who had some years before 
opened an English school in Niddry's Wynd. This was 
nearly opposite Allan Ramsay's old book-shop and circulat- 
ing library. This locality reminds us that, in the better than 
pseudo-apostolic succession of the poets, ' honest Allan's ' 
predestined successor might have seen and been seen by 
the little dapper cheery old gentleman, who in his young 
days had sung as none had sung in Scottish 'leid' since 
Sir David Lyndsay. For he had still two years of a serene, 
blithe old age before his death in 1758. Memorable, too, 
that contemporaneously in distant Ayrshire little Robert 
Burns — born 1759 — was soon to arrive to succeed his 
predecessor. 

All that has reached us — spite of considerable research — 
about Mr. Philp, is Thomas Sommers's passing notice of 
him : ' He was a teacher of respectability in his line : I knew 
him well, and his son the preacher.' 

I had hoped to have traced the latter in the Fasti Ecclesice 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 39 

Scoticance, but he nowhere occurs — and this suggests that, 
like Dominie Sampson, he was a 'stickit minister.' 

Niddry's Wynd, where Mr. Philp's school was established 
in 1756 — transferred from Blackfriar's Wynd — is all aglow 
with stirring national memories in even the somewhat dry 
historic pages of Sir Daniel Wilson's Memorials of Old 
Edinburgh, and still more brightly in Chambers's delight- 
some Traditions. 

I like to think of our small scholar peering up at the still 
preserved polished ashlar fronts and richly decorated door- 
ways of the steep old wynd, and spelling out the quaint- 
carven old-English lettered legends of their lintels. So in- 
quisitive a child, who to his dying day delighted to revert to 
the time when near this very Niddry's Wynd 

' Merlin laid Auld Reekie's causey, 
And made her o' his wark right saucy,' — 

Merlin not being the mythical soothsayer, but a Frenchman 
named Marlin, — we may be sure would let nothing escape 
him. So one is free to picture him puzzling over one or 
other of the remaining inscriptions on the dormer window 
of a well-known steep crow-stepped gable — 

(Slut ♦ 3£st • Sile • Super ♦ 2>eus ♦ (1583K 

or any one of the thousand-and-one things that there reached 
back to a hoar antiquity. 

Alexander Campbell, Irving, and Sommers state that 
Robert was only ' six months ' under Mr. Philp, when he 
was ' ready ' to enter the royal High School of his native 
city. But this brevity of preparation is an exaggeration of 
his mother's home-instruction. He went, as we saw, to Mr. 
Philp's school in 1756, and his name first appears in the 
registers of the High School as entered in the class of Mr. 
John Gilchrist in 1758 ; so that a good year and a half must 
have been spent at Mr. Philp's school. 

Once more, it speaks well for his humble parents that they 
denied themselves still further to secure for their 'wee 
laddie ' the best education the metropolis could afford. 

Mr. John Gilchrist of the High School, Fergusson's first 
master there, has been graphically sketched for us in the 



40 FAMOUS SCOTS 

pleasant Reminiscences ^ and Anecdotes of Edinburgh in 
Former Times of Henry Mackenzie — 

' Gilchrist, a good-humoured man, with a good deal of comedy about 
him : liked by the class. ' 

The other contemporary masters of the High School — even 
learned Alexander Matheson, M.A., Rector, spite of being 

introduced into Redgauntlet as ' M ,' and spite of 

a very grand tomb — have long passed into oblivion. 
Nevertheless, there are abundant evidences that the educa- 
tion was far advanced for the time, and the discipline stead- 
fast and uncompromising. Dr. Steven also gives full details 
of the course from term to term. Mackenzie summarily 
states — 

'The scholars went through the four classes taught by the under- 
masters, reading the usual elementary Latin books, — for at that time no 
Greek was taught at the High School, — and so up to Virgil and Horace, 
Sallust and portions of Livy, along with the other classics. In the 
highest class some of the scholars remained two years. ' 

The mention of Sallust sends us to Nanty Ewart's Sallust 
in Redgauntlet — a High School touch of Sir Walter. There 
follows this on the hours of attendance — 

' The hours of attendance were from 7 to 9 A.M., and after an interval 
of an hour for breakfast, from 10 to 12 ; then after another interval of 
two hours (latterly I think in my time [1752-53] three hours) for dinner, 
returned for two hours in the afternoon.' 

It cannot be doubted, therefore, that Robert Fergusson 
was well-grounded ; for John Gilchrist was a very able as 
well as a very enthusiastic teacher, and quick to take note 
of ability (Chambers's Eminent Scotsmen, s.n.). All the 
better, too, that he had the saving salt of humour. 

Unfortunately, the little fellow's attendance was all along 
broken from his delicate health. But the unanimous 
testimony of all his early biographers is that, from his native 
quickness and remarkable memory, he very soon made up 
leeway and again stood abreast of his most advantaged 
competitors. 

It argues no little force and decision of character that 
Master Robert thus handicapped, in his eighth year onward 
should have more than held his own ; for, as Mr. Alexander 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 41 

Gordon phrases it, 'The hours of the High School must 
have made pretty stiff work for an ailing boy.' 

Robert Fergusson continued at the High School for the 
full terms of four years, from 1758 to 1 760-1. 

It is interesting to learn that in 1758 he paid is., and in 
1 761 2S. 6d., to the School Library Fund — the former 
being the ordinary amount, and the latter so exceptional 
that only a Scottish nobleman is entered for a like payment. 
I was disappointed to be informed by the present most 
obliging librarian that no record was kept of the books 
given out to the boys. All agree that Robert Fergusson 
from the outset was a devourer of books, and eager to 
listen when ballad or story was being told, albeit he was 
too resolved to be a scholar to trifle during school-hours, 
as Sir Walter, in his charmingly chatty General Preface, 
confesses of himself when at the same High School. 

The roll of ' famous ' boys of the High School in its 
earlier years is fragmentary and meagre. I have gleaned 
the following contemporaries in whole or in part during the 
terms of Fergusson's attendance. The years added are of 
their entering. Sir William Fettes, Bart., Lord Provost of 
Edinburgh (1758-9) — Campbell Majoribanks, Chairman of 
the H. E. India Company (1756-7) — Walter Ross, author 
of Lectures on Conveyancing (1 760-1) — Alexander Fraser, 
Lord Woodhouselee (1758-9) — James Boswell, the Boswell 
(1756-7) — Professor John Bruce of Falkland (1761) — 
William Cruikshank, surgeon (1758) — Charles Dundas, 
M.P. for Orkney and Shetland (1758) — Major-General 
Thomas Dundas (1758) — Neil Primrose, third Earl of 
Rosebery (1757) — Lord Rosehill, eldest son of the Earl of 
Northesk (1761) — Matthew Ross, Dean of the Faculty of 
Advocates (1 760-1) — Professor James Russell (1761) — Sir 
John Sinclair, Bart., of Ulbster (17 61) — Professor Dugald 
Stewart (1761) — Archibald Burnett. 

More than one of the names in this short bead-roll 
suggest how different Robert Fergusson's short life might 
have been if one or other of them had ' remembered Joseph.' 
I think of scores on scores of men who had not a spark of 
his genius who, just because they were 'taken up ' and be- 
friended early, rose to position and prosperity. 

The greatest of all the Edinburgh High School boys, Sir 



42 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Walter, has painted for us the ongoings of the lads as 
between Town and Gown — in Redgauntlet. 

Robert Fergusson was too young — eight to eleven — and 
probably too weakly to take part in these Homeric pitched 
battles, but he must frequently have heard the stones 
clattering and seen the knuckled fists do their office. And 
even if he did not take active or actual part in the fighting 
himself, he would most certainly be well acquainted with 
those who had been taught, as Darsie Latimer was by 
Alan Fairford — 

' To smoke a cobbler, pin a losen, head a bicker, and hold the bonnets ' 
{i.e. cover the chimney-top of a cobbler to send down the smothering 
' smeek,' so as to smoke him out ; break a window ; head a skirmish 
with stones, and hold the bonnet or handkerchief which used to divide 
High School boys when fighting). 

Fergusson undoubtedly had seen those — I have been 
quoting Redgauntlet — 

' who had become the pride of the Yards and the dread of the 
hucksters of the High School Wynd,' and like them, all but certainly, 
he had not been ' contented with humbly passing through the Cowgate 
Port, without climbing over the top of it.' 'You taught me,' says 
Darsie Latimer to Fairford, ' to keep my fingers off the weak and to 
clench my fist against the strong — to carry no tales out of school — to 
stand forth like a true man — obey the stern order of Pande mamim, 
and endure my paumies without wincing, like one that is determined 
not to be the better of them. ' 

These were the glorious republican rules on which Robert 
Fergusson was trained. 

Another l p/oy f of the High School of Fergusson's day 
must have had an irresistible attraction to him, as being 
1 cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd ' in the unsavoury Cap-and- 
Feather Close, or other wynd. I refer to the Saturday 
afternoon excursions into the country. One is gladly 
willing to think of his little pallid cheeks ruddying during 
these ' escapes ' — loveable Cowley's word. Sir Walter again 
has told us of these excursions — 

' Long walks through the solitary and romantic environs of Arthur's 
Seat, Salisbury Crags, Braid Hills, and similar places in the vicinity of 
Edinburgh ; and the recollection of these holidays still forms an oasis 
in the pilgrimage which I have to look back upon.' 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 43 

Long afterwards another Old Boy celebrated in verse 
similar excursions — 

1 How we scamper'd away to the North and South Esk 
As soon as our emperor quitted his desk.' 

(Steven, pp. 99-100.) 

On completing his curriculum at the High School of 
Edinburgh, a gleam of brightness fell athwart the humble 
home of the Fergussons. 

This was through a ' presentation ' in favour of Fergusson 
to a ' mortification ' or bursary — equivalent to an exhibition 
in English universities — founded by the Rev. David Fer- 
gusson, parish minister of Strathmartine, which provided 
for the ' maintenance and education of two poor children ' 
of his own surname, at the Grammar School of Dundee 
and (if found qualified and deserving) at the University 
of St. Andrews. The influence used to obtain this is not 
recorded apparently. 

This must have brought no common joy to Mr. and Mrs. 
William Fergusson ; for not only did it secure, free of cost, a 
prolongation of a first-class education, but also gave them 
the prospect of their earnest desire being fulfilled of one 
day seeing their ' ain laddie ' walking in the footsteps of 
his two great-grandfathers — an ambition common to the 
humblest of Scottish folks, and meaning a great deal 
besides grit. 

The deed of the Strathmartine-Fergusson * bursary ' and 
the minutes of the successive meetings of the patrons that 
resulted in the ' presentation,' were given by me in full in 
my volume of 1851. It seems only necessary, therefore, to 
refer the antiquarian reader thither. But I must not 
withhold the clause that reveals the provisions and con- 
ditions made : — 

It is ' appointed and ordained ' that ' the two children of the quality 
foresaid, from the age of nine years until they attain to fourteen years 
compleat, be maintained, educate and brought up at the Grammar 
School of Dundee, and be boarded with one of the surname of Fergusson 
in case there be any that can do the same, and failzing of that, in any 
honest house, within the said Burgh, of a good report, and that at such 
rates and prices yearly or quarterly as the said patrons and administrators 
shall think fitt ; and be furnished (the saids children) with sufficient 
cloaths and necessaries for their bodies, head and feet : their coats being 
always of a grey colour lined with blue sleeves.' 



44 FAMOUS SCOTS 

A leaf having been abstracted from the Minute-Book of 
the Trust, I am unable to state exactly when Fergusson first 
entered the Grammar School of Dundee, but from docu- 
ments extant it must have been early in 1762, that is 
shortly after the completion of his final term at the 
High School of Edinburgh (1761), or when in his eleventh 
year. 

It was no going down, rather an ascent, to have been 
thus transferred from Edinburgh High School to the 
Grammar School of Dundee, as is abundantly proven by 
the well-written ' History ' of the latter, and related works of 
Mr. A. H. Millar of Dundee {Bazaar Book on the School 
and ' Roll of Eminent Burgesses 151 3- 1846': 1887). 

The engraving of it as it stood in St. Clement's Lane 
compares favourably with its then Edinburgh rival, while the 
facts narrated of the education and the masters are declarative 
of high standards. ' Boiinie Dundee,' if still we may apply 
Tom D'Urfey's epithet in his doggerel song, is justly proud 
of her great school. 

Doubtless there was heartache all round at home on 
parting with their little great-eyed ' Benjamin,' to go away 
among strangers, and a wrench to the delicate boy of eleven 
to part from his good mother especially ; for then it was a 
far cry from Edinburgh to Dundee. 

Sooth to say one can hardly help feeling that, if young 
Robert had grown up in these school and college years under 
the immediate eyes of his wise and godly parents, his whole 
after-life might have taken a finer mould and been spared 
much evil and anguish. Nevertheless, on both sides — 
parental and filial — the parting had to be borne. 

We have no intelligence of Fergusson's progress at the 
Grammar School of Dundee. He must, however, have 
continued his alertness, his impulsive fits of application, his 
bookishness ; for, when his fourteenth year was completed 
in 1764, his father had no difficulty in obtaining from the 
local Presbytery a certificate of his capacity for being put to 
the College of St. Andrews, agreeably to the terms of the 
Mortification. In the already-named volume of 185 1, the 
various minutes of meetings of the patrons and relative 
documents are reproduced at length. The gist is that 
' having sent for the boy,' and he ' signifying his inclination to 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 45 

follow out his learning and go to the College of St. Andrews,' 
the necessary papers were prepared for him as a bursar- 
student. 

This narrative of the facts of the transference from 
Edinburgh to Dundee and from Dundee to St. Andrews 
corrects a number of blunders of former biographers ; e.g., 
Bishop Gleig in Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britamiica 
(1801), and Alexander Campbell in his Introduction to the 
History of Scottish Poetry make two mistakes. The former 
marvels at and tacitly blames the paternal preference of St. 
Andrews over Fergusson's native Edinburgh University, 
when it was no preference, but was involved in the conditious 
of the bursary. The latter states that on leaving Dundee 
he returned to Edinburgh, and there pursued for one 
session his academic course. I account for Campbell's 
misstatement by an entry in the Matriculation-Book of 
Edinburgh University of a Robert Fergusson in 1765, as 
follows : — 

' RoV Ferguson Discipuli D. Gul. Wallace Legis Municipalis 
Professor 1765.' 

Having completed our narrative of Fergusson's attendance 
at the Grammar School of Dundee and its happy issue in 
his being passed on to the University, I have now to tell of 
a lesser thing that preceded his going to St. Andrews, viz. 
a visit of Robert and his mother to the North, from early in 
August to early in September of 1764. 

I am again fortunate enough to be able to illustrate this visit 
with other two letters from William Fergusson — one addressed 
to his wife, and the second to her brother — who was then 
resident at Round Lichnot, one of his various farms. These 
two letters are brim-full of interest. The earlier reveals how 
the worthy man felt ' solitary ' and ' lonely ' without his wife 
and boy ; how he was gladdened to know that ' Rob had held 
out the journey well' — doubtless most of it on foot, and 
thereby bewraying continuous home-thrift of the same type 
with the mother of Robert Nicoll, when she walked all the 
long way from Perthshire to Leeds to visit her dying son. 
Noticeable, too, is another jet of light on fireside industry in 
1 linen blued and at the lapping,' and ' a cotton-piece not yet 
off the field ' (i.e. bleaching). 



46 FAMOUS SCOTS 

William Fergusson to Mrs. Fergusson. 

1 Edinburgh, l-jth August 1764. 

'My Dearest, — As I hope this will reach you before you set out from 
Roundlichnot [for some other of the farms unnamed] I hereby ac- 
knowledge the receipt of your favours of 13th. This day has removed 
my anxiety's occasioned by frequent apprehensions of your having met 
with some disaster in your journey, by the bad weather, or otherways. I 
notice your resolution with regard to the time of setting out, and approve 
thereof, notwithstanding I have had a solitary fortnight already, and in 
view of a third lonely Sabbath, the only time I can command as my 
own. It gives me no small satisfaction to find you have had so agreeable 
a meeting with your brother and sisters, and that Rob has held out 
the journey. 

' I arrived from Saltonfield Sunday morning by 9 o'clock, when it 
rained so hard in this country, that I was wet [to] the skin. 

' Your linen is blued, and at the lapping, and will be in soon : the 
cotton piece not yet off the field, as they are determined for a good 
colour. Your compts. to Kylahuntlie came too late, for they set out 
for Badenoch with Inverhall Tuesday last and left compts. to you. 

' I would have wrote Mr. Forbes and thanked him for his civilities, 
but had only time to scrawl this for you in the office ; during which 
performance I had twenty interruptions. Meantime I make offer of 
compts. to your brother ; Mrs. Forbes ; the Aunt in case the care about 
her cat will allow her to accept of them : and to all other friends and 
relations in the neighbourhood. 

' It's become dark, so must conclude with wishing Mr. Forbes and 
family all possible happiness, and yourself a speedy and safe return. — 
I am, my Dearest, your aff e . Husband, Will. Fergusson.' 1 

The fact that the foregoing letter was among the Inver- 
arity MSS. lets us know that the good woman had pre- 
served it and brought it back with her to Edinburgh. This 
is beautiful. Now comes a brightly humorous letter. 

William Fergusson to Mr. John Forbes. 

' Edinburgh, 13th September 1764. 

' Dear Sir, — I had the pleasure of your obliging favours of 7th inst. 
advising me of your family's welfare, at which we are all extremely 
glad. I hear with some concern that the aunt's affection for the cat 
is not in any degree alienate, considering that now she has an oppor- 
tunity of seeing an object that merits her warmest affections ; and as 
my wife has heard nothing from her by this opportunity, she is suspicious 
of having offended her by saying something she thought hurtfull to 
Gibbie's character (=puss). 

' My wife was not a bit wearied on her return, and has been in a much 

1 The odd word ' lapping ' (as above) means ' beating, ' a well-known 
process ; and we still speak of ' lapping water ' or water beating on a 
rock. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 47 

better state of health since, than for some years past, and has recovered 
a keen appetite. 

* It will give me real pleasure to know so oft as opportunity permitts, 
how you, Mrs. Forbes, the Aunt and little Jamie do, as it is the only 
thing next to a personal interview, which the uninterrupted hurry of 
business presents. 

1 Baby ( = Barbara) and her husband are well, and with my wife, Hary, 
Rob and Pegie, join with me in most affectionat compliments to you, 
Mrs. Forbes and young son, the Aunt and all other connections in your 
neighbourhood : being in a hurry, I am, dear Sir, your most aff e . 
Brother and humble Serv*., Will. Fergusson. 

' Please mind the Aunt to call for a £ lb. of snuff from the waggoner. ' 

These letters, with their sparkle of humour concern- 
ing the venerable and 'touchy' spinster whose 'mull' is 
replenished as a peace-offering for any real or imagined 
disrespect to Gibbie, presents William Fergusson in ' good 
spirits' — as the saying is in Scotland. This is explained 
by the mention of Saltonfield. This was Salton Field in 
Haddingtonshire, which was the first place selected by 
the British Linen Company for a bleachfield. In 1762-3 
he obtained the post of managing - clerk — designated 
sometimes 'accountant' — in the linen department of this 
great Company in the Canongate of Edinburgh. His 
appointment was made in view of the gradual winding-up 
of the linen manufacturing department, preparatory to the 
Company becoming the strong and renowned Bank proper 
that it speedily became and still remains. 1 

His early merchant and trading experiences in Aberdeen 
and in Carrubber's Close, Edinburgh, combined with his 
abilities as an accountant, peculiarly qualified William 
Fergusson for his new position, and specifically for carrying 
the Company over the transition period. 

He remained in this respectable and responsible post in 
the Bank, as in the Company, until his death ; never having 
great emoluments, but all along held in the highest esteem by 
the able men who sustained the business. During these 
closing years he must have been altogether less hurried, less 
worried, and much more master of his own time and goings. 

1 A privately-printed brochure (1896-7) of the Bank gives an interest- 
ing account of the origin and progress of the British Linen Company, 
as a linen company and as a bank, from 1 746 onward. All honour is 
due to its founders. 



48 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Not only so, but while still in the employment of Mr. 
Walter Fergusson he obtained through Lord Deskford a 
temporary sinecure office of clerk to the French prisoners 
of war in Edinburgh, wherein Campbell states 'he was of 
the utmost service to the Government as well as to the 
unfortunate prisoners.' 

Mrs. Fergusson must have greatly enjoyed her month's 
visit to her native district, while we may be sure that to so 
lively and impressionable a boy it could not but be as 
' opening paradise.' 

Round Lichnot, whither the visitors proceeded in the first 
instance, is just the wooded, bosky, hill-bastioned country 
for a quick boy's holiday — opening out in all directions for 
walks, bird-nesting, trouting, hazel-nut and bramble-berry 
gathering, pilgrimages to famous spots, and the like. 

The present dwelling-house of Round Lichnot commands 
an extensive view of the Howe of the Garioch. In one 
part of the wood called 'the Doulart,' there was a small 
heronry. This means that there were tall trees, and Master 
Robert certainly would climb them. But play would not 
be all, in the prospect of proceeding to the University. I 
like to conceive of him as seeking out the death-scene of 
Macbeth, and historic places associated with Robert Bruce 
and the Comyns, the Battle of Harlaw, and the still living 
memories of the '15 and '45. These would lead him to hill- 
tops — Bennachie chief — and rivers, Urie and Don — forestry 
and moors, with old legend-haunted castles — Kildrummy — 
Barra — and affording the vividly imaginative boy abundant 
scope for observation and enjoyment. 



CHAPTER V 

UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS^ 

' The city of the scarlet gown. ' 

Andrew Lang. 

By our narrative in c. iv. it is seen that Fergusson was 
at home in Edinburgh in September 1764, after his 
vacation rambles among the hills and woodland of his 
uncle's farms and their classic neighbourhood. The house- 
hold had then probably removed from the Cap-and-Feather 
Close to another of the same type of decayed splendour, 
called Warriston's Close, also off the High Street — our 
next letter of William Fergusson being dated from there. 

I resist the temptation of dwelling on the historic- 
biographic memories and associations of this new wynd- 
home. Are they not written in the chronicles of Dr. 
Robert Chambers, Sir Daniel Wilson, John Reid, and a host 
of other lovers of our fair city ? 

The prematurely ageing couple — William Fergusson, alas ! 
troubled with an asthma and ' a sair host ' ( = cough) — were 
now grandfather and grandmother; for, in sending the 
' affectionate compliments ' of themselves and Hary and 
Rob and Peggie, it will be remembered Baby, i.e. Barbara 
Fergusson and her husband Duval, were reported as 'well/ 
and their first-born arrived. 

Young Robin, now in his fourteenth year, had thus an 
interval of some months in his native city. But the holiday- 
time wore to an end. The bursary was to be looked after. 
And so, on 7th December 1764, father and son — as the 
minute runs — 'compeared' before the patrons, with the 
result already told. 

Fergusson's mother was so out-and-out a sagacious 
woman, as well as devout — as was Agnes Brown, mother 



50 FAMOUS SCOTS 

of the greater Robert — that we may assume that her ebullient 
and impulsive ' laddie ' received many a grave counsel and 
heard many a fervent prayer in his behalf. After the 
Scottish reticent manner, the whole family would be quietly 
proud of their Robert's going to College. 

It is permissible to imagine them all gathered around the 
family-hearth and the immortal portraiture of the ' Cotter's 
Saturday Night ' foreshown — 

' The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years ; 

Anticipation forward points the view ; 
The mother, wi' her needles an' her shears, 
Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new ; 
The father mixes a' wi' admonition due' (st. 5). 

The mother would be doubly called on in this instance 
to requisition her * needles an' her shears ' and her utmost 
skill ; for the provided ' grey suit, with blue sleeves,' of the 
Grammar School, Dundee, would be roughly used in Round 
Lichnot woods, and perchance require to be adapted for the 
University. 

I have a vision of mother and son on their knees just 
before parting, for the Inverarity MSS. told me of a gift- 
Bible in two volumes daintily bound in red morocco with 
flaps, and an inscription written by the mother and her 
Robert's name. I can hardly forgive the carelessness that 
lost this relic — all the more that Robert Fergusson himself 
preserved it lovingly, and in the deep-shadowed end clave 
to it. I can think, and one thinks inevitably, of only one 
other copy of the Bible of equal sacredness — the gift to 
1 Highland Mary.' 

It needs not that I reproduce here from my volume of 
185 1 either the missive-letter of the patrons that Fergusson 
carried with him, or a letter from his father to the Treasurer 
of the University on arrangement for payments of the 
bursary money and dues. Things must have been pleasantly 
arranged as wished by William Fergusson ; and though it is 
somewhat anticipating, it may be at this point mentioned from 
Chambers, that Fergusson was accustomed to perpetrate in 
connection with his receiving monies, a frolic which marks 
the singular vivacity of his character : — 

' Whenever he received a remittance from his friends at Edinburgh, 
he hung out the money in a little bag attached by a string to the end of 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 51 

a pole fixed on his [chamber] window, and there he would let it dangle 
for a whole day in the wind. He is supposed to have done this partly 
from puerile exultation in the possession of his wealth [!] and partly by 
way of making a bravado in the eyes of his companions ; among whom, 
no doubt, the slenderness of their funds, and the failure of supplies, 
would be frequent subjects of raillery.' 

The Registers of St. Andrews University are strangely 
imperfect at the period of Robert Fergusson's arrival there. 
But fortunately his matriculation is duly entered — signed 
in a schoolboy rounded autograph, very different from that 
adopted later. It is under date of February 1765, or in 
his fifteenth year. 

Incidentally William Fergusson's letter to the Treasurer 
informs us that his Professors of 1764-5 were Wilson and 
Morton. The former was Professor of Humanity or Latin, 
the latter of Greek. These constituted the usual first 
session's course, as it still does in all the Scottish Churches. 
The other Professors of Fergusson's time were Robert 
Watson, Logic and Metaphysics — a compound of Bacon, 
Locke, and Aristotle filtered through Peter Ramus, and 
which must have been very humdrum and commonplace ; 
John Young, Moral Philosophy; William Wilkie, D.D., 
Natural Philosophy ; Nicolas Vilant, Mathematics ; Richard 
Dick, Civil History. 

When the ' boy,' summoned before the patrons, stated that 
it was his wish to ' pursue his learning ' by going to College, 
his intention was to study with a view to becoming a 
minister of the Kirk of Scotland. 

It is to be suspected that, notwithstanding those clerical 
links that we have traced (in c. ii.) this was a choice made 
for him by his godly father and mother rather than by 
himself; for both seem to have kept in tenacious and 
loving memory their boy's two great-grandfathers, as well as 
shared that Scottish ambition (so un-English) to have at 
least ' ae son ' in the ministry of the gospel. 

I have known the double influence to work blessedly. I 
have also known it to work disastrously. 

It cannot be supposed that, so early as in his twelfth 
or even fourteenth year, Fergusson could personally have 
any decided resolution or leaning toward the destination 
intended for him. But he reverenced his reverence-worthy 



52 FAMOUS SCOTS 

father and loved his mother too fondly to go contrary to 
their wishes. Accordingly, so early as 1765-6, he is found 
writing his name on his class-books ' Rob*. Fergusson, 
Student in Divinity ' ! One book with this inscription was 
formerly in possession of Mrs. Inverarity. It is entitled 
A Defence of the Church Government, Faith, Worship, and 
Spirit of the Presbyterians. By John Anderson, M.A., 17 14. 
I have seen several others, and among them, if I err 
not, a neatly-bound copy of Professor William Dunlop's 
masterly Introduction to the Confession of Faith, with 
numerous markings, and also of Ralph Erskine's extremely 
remarkable metaphysique, Faith no Fancy, and odd 
volumes of the Poets. In every case I was struck with 
the fineness of the copies chosen ; our Poet, like Michael 
Bruce, the sweet singer of the ' Ode to the Cuckoo ' and the 
Logan-filched ' Paraphrases,' having been evidently nice in 
regard to his books. 

Certain of these chance-preserved books of Fergusson are 
valuable biographically as indicating two things, viz. that he 
had sought to master the teaching of that Creed and body 
of doctrine that he might one day be called on to subscribe 
and profess and preach; and secondly, poetical tastes. 
His Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton, Samuel 
Butler, Pope, Shenstone, John Gay, and Thomas Gray were 
good and suggestive selections, and compare favourably 
with Robert Burns's list of early-read books. 

He entered the University with the highest promise. He 
brought a fine record from his advent in Mr. Philp's English 
School in Niddry's Wynd, and of his progress through the 
four years in the High School of Edinburgh, and his three 
years in the Grammar School of Dundee. His course 
throughout was rightly characterised by Dr. David Irving — 
chilliest and most meanly prejudiced of his biographers 
— as ' surprising.' 

Neither Professor Wilson nor Professor Morton has left 
behind him any proof of scholarship or teaching faculty. 
On the contrary, the late Professor William Tennant of the 
same University had the impression that they were both 
'dry sticks,' notwithstanding their absorption of abundant 
claret and ale, and utterly unfitted to stir to enthusiasm of 
learning. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 53 

However this may have been, Mr. Thomas Ruddiman — 
the cultured son of the grammarian, Thomas Ruddiman 
— in his little memoir of Fergusson of 1779 — states, that 
the young Poet had said to him ' that Virgil and Horace 
were the only Latin authors he would ever look at while he 
was at the University.' 

His High School master, John Gilchrist, no doubt in- 
doctrinated him with the twofold preference. In agreement 
with it, his 'Farmer's Ingle' has a motto from Virgil, while — it 
is believed — one of his earliest pieces in the vernacular is 
the rendering of Horace (Ode xi. lib. i.). I make room for 
this snatch, and it may be set beside Allan Ramsay's 
wonderful rendering of the Ode to Thaliarchus, ' Look up to 
Pentland's tow'ring tap.' 

'Ne'er fash your thumb what gods decree 
To be the weird o' you or me, 
Nor deal in cantrup's kittle cunning 
To speir how fast your days are running ; 
But patient lippen for the best, 
Nor be in dowy thought opprest, 
Whether we see mair winters come 
Than this that spits wi' canker'd foam. 

Now moisten weel your geyzand wa's 
Wi' couthy friends and hearty blaws ; = a pipe. 
Ne'er let your hope o'ergang your days, 
For eild and thraldom never stays : 
The day looks gash, toot aff your horn, 
Nor care yae strae about the morn.' 

I call this Ode early, because I found it among the 
Ruddiman MSS., written in a very boyish hand, as though 
it had been a High School exercise, corresponding with that 
of Sir Walter's which Dr. Steven so proudly facsimiled in 
his ' History.' This being so, surely the raciness and dis- 
tinction of the vocabulary of this probably eleven or twelve 
years old paraphrase, is notable and prophetic. Within the 
small compass of fourteen lines we have these thoroughly 
Scottish words — 'fash,' 'weird,' 'cantrups,' 'kittle,' 'speir,' 
'lippen,' 'dowy,' 'mair,' 'weel,' 'geyzand,' 'wa's,' 'couthy,' 
'blaws,' 'o'ergang,' 'eild,' 'gash,' 'toot aff,' 'yae strae,' 'the 
morn.' Not since Allan Ramsay's rural pipe had ceased 
its music had the vernacular been turned to so effective 
account. 

The fact that he had thus before entering his teens 



54 FAMOUS SCOTS 

dashed off such a successful and idiomatic little poem pre- 
pares us for another fact, that he was only newly arrived and 
entered in the University when he came to be known as a 
rhymer in the vernacular. But Thomas Sommers overstates 
when he says that ' at this time [1765] his poetical talents 
were beginning to appear,' and that ' every day produced 
something new from his fertile pen, which was employed in 
satirising the foibles of the Professors and of his fellow- 
students.' 

' Every day . . . something new ' is rather strong. But 
it seems certain that, if he did not like Pope ' lisp in 
numbers,' he could affirm with a greater bard, that he ' was 
early smit with the love of song.' Nor is the testimony of 
his early biographers, that his verse-attempts — borrowing 
Henry Ellison's coinage — won the admiration of his 
Professors as well as of his fellow-students, to be overlooked. 
That they were satiric of themselves, and nevertheless 
pleased, is noteworthy. 

We have more than rumour and his biographers' apprecia- 
tions to settle this matter. Professor David Gregory, a 
scion of the famous Gregory family, died on 13th April 
1765, or within about three months of Fergusson's entrance 
on his academic studies, and forthwith there was being 
circulated in manuscript an Elegy on his death, in vernacular 
strong and racy of the soil as the Horatian ode, and 
redolent at a bound of his dry, sly humour, irrepressible 
waggery, and distinctive picturesqueness. This Elegy is 
so unmistakable an evidence that Robert Fergusson in his 
fifteenth year had so far ' found himself,' that we must pause 
over three of its stanzas : — 

'Now mourn, ye college masters a' ! 
And frae your ein a tear lat fa', 
Fam'd Gregory death has taen awa' 

Without remeid ; 
The skaith ye've met wi's nae that sma', 

Sin Gregory's dead. 

He could, by Euclid, prove lang syne 
A ganging point compos'd a line ; 
By numbers too he cou'd divine, 

Whan he did read, 
That three times three just made up nine ; 

But now he's dead. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 55 



Great 'casion hae we a' to weep, 

An' cleed our skins in mourning deep, 

For Gregory death will fairly keep 

To take his nap ; 
He'll till the resurrection sleep 

As sound's a tap.' 

All things considered, I must pronounce the little Ode 
and this Elegy to have been a preluding ' new note ' amidst 
the hackneyed conventionalities and smooth inanimities of 
the poetry of the period, and a foreshadowing that the 
college of William Dunbar, William Stewart, and Sir David 
Lyndsay — all St. Andrews students — would have one suc- 
cessor at least. Then the Elegy is important as being a 
typical example of the length the boy-student allowed him- 
self to go. It attests that his satire was wholly playful and 
without malice. One laments that other examples have not 
been transmitted. That there were others, as Sommers 
represents, is certain. Thomas Ruddiman thus puts it : ' He 
had not been long at College when certain Macaronic satires 
against some of the masters were circulated by him.' 

These poetic exercises may be interpreted as declarative 
of the fact that our Poet was desultory rather than systematic 
in his studies ; intermittent, not steadfast. But, as at the 
High School of Edinburgh, he never had any difficulty in 
making up arrears when stung into application. From 
childhood, as we saw, his constitution was delicate and 
hindering. None the less he must have had a remarkable 
recuperative vitality ; for whenever called upon for specific 
exertion he overcame his natural sickliness and racking 
headaches and sleeplessness, and went at the required tasks 
with a will and swing. This is the testimony of all his 
biographers. 

The late Ven. Principal Dr. John Lee of Edinburgh 
University drew up for me a list of the ultimately more 
distinguished fellow-students of Fergusson as follows : — 
Professor Playfair, Principal Dr. Hill, Dr. John Hill, Dr. 
Andrew Duncan, the Hon. Henry Erskine, and his 
brother Lord Chancellor Erskine, Dr. James Brown, Dr. 
William Ritchie, Dr. George Campbell, father of John, 
Lord Chancellor Campbell, Mr. David Wilkie, father of 
Sir David Wilkie ; and Dr. Lee himself must be added. 



56 FAMOUS SCOTS 

There was no registration of admissions in successive 
sessions or terms in St. Andrews University beyond the 
initial matriculation signature ; indeed, even later, it would 
seem no accurate roll of the students was kept. Hence we 
cannot now ascertain the order of Fergusson's academic 
curriculum. But it may safely be assumed that he followed 
the usual course of a student in divinity after two sessions 
in Latin and Greek, viz. Mathematics, Logic and Meta- 
physics, Ethics or Moral Philosophy, and Natural Philosophy. 
I do not find that he ever entered on the study of theology 
proper. 

Unexpectedly, for so mercurial a lad, it is stated by his 
first biographers that he excelled in Mathematics. It is also 
known from various authentic sources that he early gained 
the marked approbation and friendship of Professor William 
Wilkie of the Natural Philosophy class. One pleasant 
evidence of this is that this remarkable man — no poet, as 
The Epigoniad and Fables demonstrate, but of unquestion- 
able brains and conversational force after the type of 
Samuel Johnson — employed Fergusson to make a fair copy 
of his Lectures, and was wont to carry him with him at 
1 week-ends ' to his hillside farm. The last a noticeable 
thing to be returned upon. 

Of course, in our knowledge of his temperament and 
sprightly character we expect to hear of tricks and frolics, 
freaks and fantasies, of riotous animal spirits, gamesome 
poking i' the ribs of shallow-pated Gravity and pompous 
Inaninity ; nor are we disappointed. The sorrow and the 
shame it is that, as with that ghoul, Gabriel Harvey, writing 
evil of Robert Greene in the teeth of a penitence that might 
have melted the stoniest heart ; or as Robert Burns had in 
Robert Heron a mean-spirited avenger of the poet's too 
realistic portraiture of him in his verse-letter to Dr. Black- 
lock, that fired him to rake the gutters of Dumfries gossip 
for garbage ; or as Rufus Griswold, in our own generation, 
first drew the moral-portrait of Edgar Allan Poe in darkest 
colours fetched from malignant slanderers — the first teller of 
these floating anecdotes so took them down from ' Scandal's 
unforgiving lips ' as to poison the minds and mislead the 
judgment of nearly all after-biographers. I charged Dr. 
David Irving with it in his lifetime, and I place it in fore- 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 57 

front record here, that in his first Life of Fergusson he put 
things in such a fashion as conveyed a wholly wrong 
impression of the Poet's character. True that in his second 
edition of 1 800-1 he had ignominiously to retract in a post- 
script the blackest of his false averments ; but, unhappily, 
instead of cancelling the pages that contained the false- 
hoods, his retractations were hidden away at the end of 
the book, and the evil was done and has been perpetuated, 
as evidenced by e v en R. L. Stevenson's and Andrew Lang's 
falling in with the mendacious and cruel epithets of 
1 drunken ' and ' vicious,' and with a conception of him as 
from the beginning a ' wastrel.' The simple truth is that all 
this detestable misconception and misrepresentation have 
arisen from exaggerating mere frolics into vices, mere 
boyish tricksomeness into crimes, and so capturing 
successive biographers. 

To make good this my condemnation, I shall in 
integrity place before my readers the whole of these 
anecdotes. The first comes early, viz. that on one occasion 
having strayed with some fellow ' scarlet-gowns ' into a farm- 
house on the Magus Muir, — a Saturday afternoon favourite 
excursion, — and learning that the herd ' laddie ' had sur- 
feited himself with theftuous practice in the dairy, Fergusson 
asked to be shown the ' culprit-patient,' and this being done, 
sucked the end of his cane and prescribed with as much 
gravity as if he had been a full-fledged M.D. There you 
have the whole : and even the Rev. Dr. James Browne, who 
was his companion in the exploit, shakes his empty skull 
and — moralises ! — an arrant absurdity. 

A second anecdote is of kin with the first, and over it 
other 'boss' ( = brainless) heads have been shaken a la 
Eldon — preposterously. It thus runs : It is related that, 
his voice being excellent, he was required oftener than was 
at all agreeable to him to officiate as precentor in the 
College Chapel. 

His 'wicked wit,' says Dr. Robert Chambers, after Alexander 
Campbell, ' suggested a method of getting rid of the distasteful employ- 
ment, which he did not scruple to put in practice, though there was 
great danger that it would incense the heads of the College against him. 
It is customary in Scotland for persons who are in a dangerous state 
of illness, or who by other "necessary causes" are detained from 
public worship, to give in a line or written request, asking the prayers 



58 FAMOUS SCOTS 

of the congregation, which the precentor reads aloud immediately before 
the prayer. Fergusson, availing himself of this custom, rose up in the 
desk and, with the usual nasal solemnity of tone, pronounced as if 
read from a paper this petition : " Remember in prayer, a young man 
(then present) of whom, from the sudden effects of inebriety, there 
appears but small hope of recovery. " A contretemps so utterly inde- 
corous, so travestying proprieties, could not but be frowned upon by the 
grave Professors, not the less so from the incontrollable titter and mirth 
with which it was received among the students, and eke, for they were 
no Agelasti, on more than one professorial visage, on the occasion.' 

Fergusson was 'reprimanded,' and — what he wished — 
relieved of his precentorship, but continued to be heard 
clear as a bell above all others in the singing of the College 
Kirk, as one who knew testified to Hugh Miller. 

Close bordering on profanity, some i unco guid'' may 
exclaim ; and yet there was no shadow of profanity intended, 
or in the young wag's thought. 

A third anecdote is pretty much akin with the second. 
Dr. Charles Rogers, in his Autobiography (pp. 15, 16), 
tells it at great length, on the authority of his aged father. 
I must summarise. The food of even the bursar-students 
— as we shall see anon — was poor and unvaried, and 
Fergusson planned to secure an improvement. The 
opportunity soon offered itself. Each bursar had to take 
his turn in invoking a ' blessing ' at the meals. On his turn 
coming round, he with all gravity repeated these lines — 

' For rabbits young and for rabbits old, 
For rabbits hot and for rabbits cold, 
For rabbits tender and for rabbits tough, 
Our thanks we render, for we've had enough.' 

The Professors, we are told, were aghast, and — silent. 
The Senatus Academicus was convened, and the venerable 
masters of the College deliberated as to how the offender 
should be punished. It was ultimately ruled that the 
graceless poet should not only escape censure, but that the 
vendor of rabbits — and again this was just what Fergusson 
wished — should be instructed that his supply would be 
required less frequently. 

Once more, how wooden, how utterly without least 
sense or understanding of humour, your ' moralisers ' who 
magnify this ebullience of waggery into 'a grave moral 
offence ' ! Fiddlesticks, ' most reverend doctors ' ! 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 59 

As I write these words there reaches me, in Good Words 
for August 1897, a charming paper by Sheriff Campbell 
Smith, LL.D., on a 'Scotch Lady of the Olden Time,' 
Mrs. James Hunter of St. Andrews ; and lo ! her ' reminis- 
ence ' of that grandest and strongest and also most loveable 
of Scotsmen — Thomas Chalmers — comes to laugh out of 
court all such pharisaic vituperation of Robert Fergusson 
for frolics such as these. 

' She held,' says the Sheriff, 'a better opinion of Chalmers than most 
of the then citizens of St. Andrews. She said, ' ' The Toon's folk called 
him ' Daft Tarn Chalmers,' but there was naething daft about him ; 
he was a wild, merry reel-o'-Bogie laddie, full of fun and mischief, but 
very clever. I aye thought he would turn out something uncommon, 
but I never thought he would turn out a saint " ' (p. 564). 

Let that clear the cobwebs from green-spectacled eyes 
when misled into hard thoughts of our young Poet. I cap 
it, too, with the story told by Mr. James Inverarity, his 
nephew. Asking one of the attendant ' gate-porters ' if he 
remembered Fergusson, he received for answer, — and at a 
dash it paints him for us, — ' Bob Fergusson ! Did I ken 
him ? Ay, weel I did. I've aften pitten him tae the door. 
He was a tricky callant, but a fine laddie for d that.'' Most 
just : the impulse of the moment appears at all times to 
have been irresistible with Fergusson ; and, accordingly, 
if a frolicsome and mirth-provoking idea got into his ever- 
working brain, it must instanter take shape, come what 
penalty might. 1 

I come now to the last and basest transmitted anecdote, 
and I must give proof and disproof in full; for the most 
pestiferous and prejudiced account was given by Dr. David 
Irving, as thus — 

' What amused himself tended to disturb the quiet of others. His 
misdemeanours were either so frequent, or of such a kind that, after a 
residence of four years, he exposed himself to the disgrace of a formal 
expulsion from the University. The eloquence of Dr. Wilkie was 
powerfully exerted in his behalf, but without producing the desired 
effect ; the other members of the Senatus Academicus were by no 
means disposed to listen to his arguments ; and the imprudent youth 
was accordingly dismissed ' (p. 9). 

1 Dr. Rogers gives other two anecdotes on two fellow-students, but as 
they are poor, and as the names introduced are not found in the College 
lists, it is not worth while reproducing them, 



60 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Such a harsh and unqualified statement naturally aggrieved 
the admirers of the Poet. The afterwards renowned 
Professor Playfair at once challenged the narrative, and, as 
we saw, Irving had to withdraw it. But this was justifiably 
held to be insufficient. It was held that justice could only 
be done by absolutely cancelling the leaf containing the 
account. This was not done. An additional cost of 
perhaps a sovereign was reckoned to outweigh the claims 
of the dead young Poet. And so his nephew before-named, 
Mr. James Inverarity, published in the Scots Magazine a 
paper entitled ' Strictures on David Irving's Life of Robert 
Fergusson' (1801, p. 19), which, though not well put 
together, gave documentary proof traversing the statement. 
Thither I refer my readers wishful to verify my accusation. 
I prefer giving here a briefer narrative, which, by the two- 
fold kindness of the Ven. Principal Lee and Dr. David 
Laing, it was my privilege to furnish in my vol. of 185 1. 
The following record of the incident is taken from the 
Manuscript Private Journal of Professor and Principal 
Tullidelph of St. Andrews. As this Journal was kept 
regularly day after day from the year 1734 to 1774, it is 
first-hand authority. 

1 z6tk March 1768. 

' I extruded Alexander Grant sine spe redeundi ( = without hope of 
return) on account of a continued course of irregularity for some weeks 
past, particularly for a riot committed with some accomplices on Lewis 
Grant, about one o'clock of the morning of this 26th of March, and 
also extruded Ro^ Fergusson and Charles Stewart, his accomplices in 
that riot. Ro fc . Fergusson likewise had wantonly given up John 
Adamson's name to be prayed for. I deprived John Adam son of his 
Server's place, for being out all night, and for imposing on the Heb- 
domadar, by a false pretext, to get to the dancing school another night. 

1 N.B.— 30th March 1768. Ro*. Fergusson and Charles Stewart 
were received in again at a meeting of the Masters. ' 

Dr. Robert Chambers, in striking contrast with Irving, 
thus generously summarises the very small matter : — 

* On the whole, this transaction affords a proof that Fergusson, what- 
ever might have been his indiscretions, had not, by refractory or dis- 
respectful conduct, rendered himself obnoxious to the heads of the 
University, since, had that been the case, it is to be presumed they 
would have availed themselves of this infraction of academical discipline 
to make good his expulsion ' {Eminent Scotsmen, s.n.). 

Precisely so. The ' riot ' was a collision between the 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 61 

winners and the losers of the Earl of Kinnoul's prizes ; and 
he must have slender knowledge of school and college life 
who magnifies such inevitable conflicts into prodigious 
wickedness. How easy it were to parallel all this in the 
lives of afterwards illustrious and venerated men : ay, and 
Robert Fergusson was just the type of lad to stand up, 
like Donovan Farrant, and accuse himself of leadership in 
the row. To your wise blockheads who think otherwise 
and will moralise, I call on Robert Burns to speak — 

' The cleanest corn that e'er was dight 
May hae some piles o' caff in, 
Sae ne'er a fellow-mortal slight 
For random fits o' daffin'.' 

I note, finally, that Robert Fergusson was then only a little 
over seventeen years of age ! 

I feel sure that my full account will be acceptable, and 
neutralise the perpetually recrudescent misrepresentation. 

Contemporaneous with these incidents, Fergusson was 
occupied with poetical plans ; nor was he without a sound 
adviser besides Dr. Wilkie. In a letter from his sailor- 
brother Hary, we get a glimpse of him — 

' I read with attention the Burial-letter you versified and your 
poetical letter to the Cripple Laureat [I intercalate, probably Claudero, 
alias cripple James Wilson, the doggerel rhymer, who has just been 
introduced as a leading character in Omond's novel of Edinburgh in 
1774, IS Estrange] : the former I approve of, but cannot recommend y e 
latter in point of rhyme. You'll please notice that the first and fifth 
and the second and fourth lines, in compositions of the like kind, such 
as Habbie Simpson, &c, chime with one another.' 

The date of this letter is torn away, but from a subsequent 
notice of the ' New Theatre going briskly forward,' the 
foundation of which had been laid on 16th March 1768, 
it must have belonged to that year. 

Neither of the poems criticised has been preserved. But 
he was aiming at something higher than mere occasional 
verses. For not only was he writing on fly-leaves of some 
of his books dramatic speeches, but it appears certain that 
he had proceeded as far as two acts of a tragedy on Sir 
William Wallace — a characteristic election of subject. He 
abandoned his project, it is alleged, from having met with a 
play on the same subject and fearing that his might be held 



62 FAMOUS SCOTS 

as a plagiarism. The thing is somewhat vaguely told by 
Bishop Gleig in Supplement to Encyclopedia Britannica ; 
and Thomas Sommers discredits the intention, though on 
insufficient grounds. No play of the period on Wallace is 
known. I can only conjecture that he had somehow come 
across 'The Valiant Scot' of Bowyer (?), 1637, the valiant 
Scot being Wallace. There are bits in the long-forgotten 
play not without patriotic verve, but hardly of such quality 
as to have discouraged the most timorous from another 
attempt. But it is scarcely to be regretted that the two acts 
were suppressed. For his dramatic fragments — wherein 
Sisera is introduced — show that he had not mastered the 
laws of blank verse. 

Looking back now upon the road we have traversed, 
we see there are certain things that demand our considera- 
tion if we would master at once a complex moral problem 
and the ultimate manifestation of his poetical faculty. 

I have before stated that, in my judgment, it had been 
better for Robert Fergusson if Edinburgh rather than St. 
Andrews had been his University, and his home under his 
parents' roof-tree rather than in the bursar chamber of the 
latter city. I return on this. 

St. Andrews at the period of Fergusson's residence, from 
1765 to 1768, was fallen from its ancient glory. It was a 
sleepy and sordid place for so brilliant and effervescent a 
spirit. Notwithstanding the praises of it by no less a man 
than Defoe in his famous ' Tour,' it was a decaying and insani- 
tary city. Only ale-houses abounded. That they did abound 
is certain; for even a decade and more later there were no 
fewer than two hundred and fifty in it — as sarcastically testifies 
Robert Heron in his ' Tour ' — and others might be adduced. 
What society there was was stiff, ceremonial, unintellectual. 
We have proof on proof of this in Alexander Fergusson's 
Life of Henry Erskine and the Erskines — the two brothers 
having been, in fact, contemporary with Fergusson. The 
two brilliant boys found life extremely slow. Even their 
food was insufficient and, like the ' rabbits ' of Fergusson's 
story, unvaried. These home-frugalities drew from the then 
juvenile Thomas Erskine (embryo Lord Chancellor) this 
among other waggish rhymes that our Poet might have 
fathered — 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 63 

' Papa is going to London, 

And what will we get then, oh ? 
But sautless kail and an old cow's tail, 
And half the leg of a hen, oh ! ' 

On the same trend of observation I have to accentuate 
that, as the accounts reveal, the bursar-students had an 
extremely generous daily and nightly allowance of ale, as well 
as at odd times from John Hogg the College ' porter, who 
was ' licensed ' to supply ale and beer. No doubt at a time 
when tea was ten shillings, and sugar eleven shillings a pound, 
these luxuries could hardly have been expected by the lads. 
But will it be deemed too hard on the University authori- 
ties, if I express a suspicion that, as with the boy at Eton who 
became the great scholar Richard Porson, it may have been 
at the College that his thirst for nut-brown ale or beer, that 
drew him perchance over-frequently to Lucky Middlemist's 
and Johnnie Dowie's, originated ? 

Besides all this, Defoe found himself shut up severely 
to censure the ruinous and unclean condition of the class- 
rooms and students' apartments. 

Chevalier Johnstone's vitriolic description of the place 
and people only a short time preceding Fergusson's 
coming, may be read now without passion — 

' It [St. Andrews] was full of the accursed race of Calvinists, hypocrites 
who cover over their crimes with the veil of religion ; fraudulent and 
dishonest in their dealings ; who carry their holy dissimulation so far 
as to take off their bonnets to say grace when they take even a pinch 
of snuff ; who have the name of God constantly in their mouths, and 
hell in their hearts. No town ever so much deserved the fate of 
Sodom and Gomorra' {Memoirs, 3rd ed., 1822). 

I believe the safety-valve of Robert Fergusson to have 
been the friendship of Professor Dr. William Wilkie, 
noticed earlier. Wilkie must have been a noticeable 
man. He had all Dr. Samuel Johnson's bearish and 
boorish roughness exteriorly, but within — like Johnson 
— there beat one of the warmest and most sympathetic of 
human hearts. He had a biting tongue, and poured out 
volubly immense erudition, and did not relish contradiction 
or interruption. Charles Townshend, after witnessing a 
controversial encounter, pronounced him the most singular 
combination of god and brute he had ever met with. But 



64 FAMOUS SCOTS 

he softened to misfortune, melted to sorrow, guilelessly 
believed what was told him. 

He ' took ' to Robert Fergusson, and Robert Fergusson 
reciprocated. Their intercourse could not be otherwise than 
bracing and nurturing to the young student, but I do not 
know that he would be very fervent in seconding Fergusson's 
suspensive intention of becoming a minister of the gospel in 
the Kirk. 1 

I close our chapter of St. Andrews by noting two things. 
The first is that in 1767 — more than twelve months 
before expiry of the bursary terms — Robert Fergusson lost 
his good father. The Rev. Walter Macleod of the Register 
House was good enough to make search for me, and the 
search yielded this entry — 

'1767. May 17. William Fergusson, Writer in Edinburgh: outside of 
Hay's burying-place : aged 53 years : died of an asthma.' 

A second thing is that on leaving his room in the College 
he, like William Cowper on leaving Olney, inscribed his 
name behind the window-shutter. 

' I discovered when at College, ' wrote Professor William Tennant to 
me, ' in 1 80 1, Robert Fergusson's name written with pencil in one of the 
small bedrooms of the old College-building, now in course of being 
demolished, that it may give place to a more elegant and convenient 
edifice.' 

Robert Fergusson returned to his widowed mother in 
Warriston's Close, Edinburgh, without needing (I hope) 
to say or feel with his poetic ancestor, William Stewart, after 
his own 'fourteine zeirs,' 

* Suppois I brocht richt litill awa' wi' me/ — 

for I do not suppose that he would have agreed with Swift 
that 'a University is a place of learning where everyone 
brought something in, and took nothing out, hence it 
multiplies.' 

1 Since the text was written I have found among the Laing MSS. in 
the University of Edinburgh certain papers of Wilkie, and lo ! his one 
vernacular poem, the fable of the ' Partan and the Hare,' I at once 
detected to be in Fergusson's well-known handwriting — a fact suggestive 
of intimacy and more. The racy footnotes I believe to have been 
also inspired by him. 



CHAPTER VI 

RETURN TO EDINBURGH FROM THE UNIVERSITY 

' Auld Reekie ! wale o' ilka toon 
That Scotland kens beneath the moon.' 

Fergusson. 

Leaving St. Andrews after his four sunny years at the 
University, he doubtless, as Andrew Lang sings, saw 
sorrowfully, for the last time perchance — 

'the long line of the violet hills 
Beyond the yellow sand ; 
The wide brown level that the water fills 
Between the sea and land ; 
The sea-bird's call and cry 
On shining sands, or dry, 
Along the foam-fringed mazes of the Bay.' 

('The End of the Terms, St. Andrews,' 
Grass of Parnassus, p. 59.) 

His father, worthy William Fergusson, having died in 
1767 — as recorded in its place — it must have been with a 
heavy, not to say foreboding, heart that his younger son 
found himself again in the lowly dwelling in Warriston's 
Close, Edinburgh, though after all his narrow College- 
chamber — eight feet by four — could not be much in advance 
of that in Bell's Land. Whatever it was, his mother's house 
must be his home until his future career was determined. 
His mother, it is sadly certain, was left almost wholly 
unprovided for ; nor was this a marvel on the slender annual 
income during her husband's lifetime that we have had 
revealed. We are not therefore surprised to discover that 
she sought to earn a scanty livelihood by taking in a lodger 
or lodgers into the spare room of her tenement. Shortly 
before, her elder son Hary had gone to sea. 

The whole facts of the story as they emerge in scattered 

5 



66 FAMOUS SCOTS 

notices of her go to indicate that Mrs. Fergusson was of 
the type of self-respecting Scotswomen later exemplified in 
Robert Nicoll's brave-hearted mother — instances that again 
make one proud of one's country. By many incidental touches 
it is clear she was of a ' proud spirit ' in a good sense, and 
struggled on without complaint or fretting, and more than 
probably without communicating her straits to her well-to- 
do friends and factor-brother, though our early letters might 
well have made him surmise his sister's poverty and straits. 
So long as his revered father lived, Robert Fergusson 
had gone forward from class to class, as before from school 
to University, fully occupied with each particular branch 
of academic learning and training, but still having for goal 
being a minister of the gospel in the Kirk of Scotland. 
When, however, in session 1767 tidings came first of his 
father's illness and next of his probably sudden death, — 
hastened, I suspect, by the exceptional severity of that year, 
a severity that also cut off much about the same time, in 
his twenty-first year, his poetic contemporary, Michael Bruce 
(died July 6, 1767), — things must have taken a different shape 
and aspect. As it had been by ' constraint, not willingly,' — 
spite of those hereditary sanctions and traditions before 
spoken of in c. ii., — that he had carried on his studies for 
the Christian ministry, it was, I feel sure, with a sense of 
release and relief that he found himself free to abandon that 
imposed intention. It is not difficult to understand how it 
should have been such release and relief. There was, to 
begin with, the home-poverty of his widowed mother and 
the expiry of the Ferguson-Strathmartine bursary. These 
united to make it imperative that he should, as soon as 
might be, add to rather than diminish her ' living.' But it 
is plain that continuity of a theological course at Edinburgh 
or St. Andrews University of another four years — as required 
then and still by the Kirk — meant abstraction, not supple- 
ment. I do not doubt that his devoted mother would 
have gone with a will into sorest self-denials and toils to 
stand by her 'laddie's' purpose, had he so determined. 
Many, very many, Scottish parents and maiden aunts known 
to me have so done. But Robert Fergusson would suffer 
no such exaction. Then — not controversially or sectarianly 
but historically — the chilly atmosphere of Moderatism in 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 67 

the Kirk of Scotland and the flagrant convivialities of the 
clergy could hardly fail to damp rather than kindle that 
enthusiasm which alone makes attractive the consecrated life 
of a minister of the gospel. Not only so, but behind all this 
there was a natural and irrepressible sprightliness, a liveliness 
of fancy, a flow and overflow of animal spirits, an abounding 
waggery, and, I must affirm, such a penetrative insight into 
and abhorrence of hypocrisy and mere professionalism, as 
combined to forewarn him that the preacher's gown and 
bands and the pulpit were neither suited for him nor he for 
them. Granted, that had he still adhered to his purpose he 
would only have done what too many then, and since, have 
done. But that was just what ' the bird in the bosom ' 
would not permit him to do. He had a lofty ideal of the 
office of a Christian minister, and would inevitably shrink 
from becoming of the kidney of the clergy of the Kirk at 
that sorrowful period. It is simple historical fact once more 
that the leading clergy of the national Kirk — Blair, 
Robertson, 'Jupiter' Carlyle, Home, and the rest, except 
a very, very small minority of Evangelicals, and even some 
of them jovial fellows, e.g. Webster, 'a five-bottle man' — 
were Pagans, inferior in their ethics to Marcus Aurelius, 
Cicero, or Seneca. They were free-living, fast-living, broad- 
spoken ; mere ' stipend - lifters ' George Fox would have 
named them. 

Fergusson's godly upbringing, and his father and mother's 
living out and up to the saintliest ideal, joined to his own 
thoroughness and veracity, demanded his pausing and 
ultimate surcease of all thought of becoming the Rev. 
Robert Fergusson, M.A. In the knowledge of Dr. David 
Irving's preposterous and inept moralising on this fact as 
on nearly all the facts of incident and accident in our Poet's 
short life, very amazing and amusing is his way of accounting 
for his abandonment of the ministry. It is too richly 
absurd to be withheld — 

' The perpetual restraint which the sacred profession necessarily 
imposes was not at all agreeable to one of his turn of mind ; and 
without submitting to this restraint, he knew he should expose himself 
to the anathemas of those who, on every occasion, stand prepared to 
wrest the vindictive thunder from the hands of omnipotence ' (p. 6, 1806). 

Fergusson would not have thanked his biographer for 



68 FAMOUS SCOTS 

such an apology. But no apology was needed. How easy 
it were to number up many and many ' brither Scots ' who 
originally studied for the Kirk and fell away from their 
purpose ! They go unblamed, why should Robert Fergusson 
be blamed? 

Our Poet was thus left — like Robert Burns after the 
1786-87 season in Edinburgh — 'without an aim.' And yet 
it is unfair to the fatherless lad to think or say so. For 
an aim did offer itself to him — an aim reasonable, un- 
ambitious, and, other things being equal, possible. 

This aim he must have formulated and prepared for with 
becoming promptitude. We have now to tell of the paling 
away of the bright hopes it kindled, the drizzling down into 
poor grey rain of the rainbow that spanned his horizon. 

I take this to have been the turning-point in the young 
life before us, and hence I must narrate the facts in fulness 
and thoroughness. 

His mother's brother, — who has already come before 
us, — Mr. John Forbes of the North, was prosperous, and 
be it noted then in 1768 not yet encumbered, as it has 
been pleaded to me, with his after large family by a 
second marriage — only one child being born at the time. 
He was relied on by mother and son to do something for 
his gifted and highly qualified nephew. By inheritance, as 
we saw, John Forbes had entered into possession of the 
farms of Templeton and Hillockhead and Wellhead and 
Round Lichnot, and, as the letters adduced show, other 
lands were leased and several estate - factorships acquired 
that brought him into closest personal relations with 
Northern nobility and gentry. Hence we are com- 
pelled to scrutinise and pronounce upon his character 
and conduct toward his sister — and such a sister 
— and toward his nephew — and such a nephew. He 
comes out badly from the outset. In c. ii. we saw that 
contemporaneously with his brother-in-law's 'abstract of 
annual expences,' showing it to be under ^20, he 
exacted payment from him for the ' casks ' of oatmeal sent 
to the Cap - and - Feather Close. Would it have been a 
prodigious stretch of liberality to have sent and re-sent this 
'newest miln'd meal,' grown and grounded on his own 
farms, as a free gift ? But no, it had to be paid for ' with 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 69 

all costs.' Again, as we saw, when his brother-in-law 
lamented that his new situation only added ^5 to his 
slender income, how deplorable was it in this well-to-do 
'factor' to cast up his 'making light' of ^25 ! I remind 
the reader of William Fergusson's quiet but manly repudia- 
tion of the heartless imputation. Then was it consistent 
with brotherly feeling — and again toward such a sister — that 
now in 1768, a year after her husband's death, he had left 
her — and I can think of no better or sufficiently poignant 
other word — to 'dree' out her widowhood in uttermost 
straits unhelped? Was it hoping against hope that his 
sister — uncomplaining, reticent — would not continue to go 
uncared for if only the actual facts were known at long 
last ? Is it to be characterised as less than abominable that 
such a one as Bishop Gleig should have represented this 
going to his uncle as having 'an eye to some sinecure 
place ' ? 

Here was a young man of indubitable natural ability, of 
trained and disciplined scholarship and culture, of a singu- 
larly alert and all-round capable intellect, and ready, as he 
was exceptionally qualified, to be employed through some 
sub-factorship to begin with. How could the man who had 
so variously provided for himself, so over-filled his own hands, 
expect anyone who knew the facts to accredit that he could not 
find or make an opening for his nephew, or invite his sister to 
' settle ' down near, if not with, him ? I put these questions 
anticipatively. The sequel of our narrative shall vindicate 
this and vindicate my passion of statement. 

Whether letters were exchanged and an invitation given 
to Fergusson, nowhere appears. But early in 1769 — for he 
had only finally left St. Andrews in November 1768 — he 
the second time proceeded North, and made his way to 
Round Lichnot, flushed with hope. 

This visit, I reiterate, I regard as the most fundamental 
factor in Robert Fergusson's career. When I wrote my 
youthful Life of the Poet in 1850-1, I yielded my own 
judgment to the persuasive representations of the excellent 
grandson of Mr. John Forbes, — John Forbes, Esq., Writer, 
Old Meldrum, — and too readily accepted his statement of the 
matter. Later researches and subsequent possession of 
memoranda in his own handwriting that somehow he had 



70 FAMOUS SCOTS 

withheld until my book was published, and a more mature 
and critical insight into the facts and circumstances, have 
compelled me to come to the reluctant but inexorable 
conclusion that this uncle, behind all his reputed respect- 
ability, must have been a miserly, hard, cold, self-seeking, 
and unloveable man — a factor of the true ' Twa Dogs ' type. 
In agreement with this we have now a miserable story to 
unfold and to put on record with righteous indignation. 1 

I will first of all take the original account by Dr. David 
Irving. This I do by preference, as it must have been 
long since seen he was about the last to be ' prejudiced ' 
in favour of Fergusson. Here it is — 

' He had an uncle living near Aberdeen, a Mr. John Forbes, who 
was in pretty affluent circumstances. To him he paid a visit, in hopes 
of procuring some suitable employment through his influence. Mr. 
Forbes at first treated him with civility ; but, instead of exerting him- 
self to promote his interest, suffered him to remain six months in his 
house, and then dismissed him in a manner which reflects very little 
honour on his memory. His clothes were beginning to assume a 
threadbare appearance ; and on this account he was deemed an 
improper guest for his uncle's house. Filled with indignation at the 
unworthy treatment he had received, he retired to a little solitary inn 
which stood at a small distance ; and having procured pen, ink, and 
paper, wrote him a letter full of the most manly sentiments. After 
his departure, Mr. Forbes began to relent, and despatched a messenger 
to him with a few shillings to bear his expenses upon the road. The 
paltry present, the lowness of his funds compelled him to accept. He 
set out for Edinburgh on foot, and at length reached his mother's house. 
The fatigues of the journey, added to the depression of his mind, had 
such an effect upon his delicate constitution, that for two or three days 
he was confined to bed' {Life, 1799 — 1800-1). 

Thomas Sommers (1803) and Alexander Peterkin (1807) 
give very much the same narrative — the former denouncing 
the uncle's 'miserly behaviour,' and the latter using all 
manner of reprobating words ; e.g., ' a sordid worldling,' and 
' his generous relative drove him from a house in which I 
think Robert Fergusson would have been an illustrious 
guest although in rags.' 

I I must state that the Forbes MSS. sent me included a sheaf of 
letters from his employers that attest more than appreciation of him, 
really warm friendship. So that I do not at all question John Forbes's 
integrity and business capacity. But these very intimacies and regards 
only aggravate his failure to find a post for his nephew. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 71 

Without appropriating either the vituperation or the 
heroics of these early biographers, I must accentuate that 
each wrote from personal information furnished by the family 
of Fergusson, and in Sommers's case by Fergusson himself. 
Because of this solid and indisputable authentication Hugh 
Miller, who personally assured me repeatedly that his ' Re- 
collections ' were based on careful and prolonged personal 
investigation, wrought the incident with finest touches into 
his Recollections of Robert Fergusson ; and Mr. Alexander 
Gordon, in his admirable Study of his Life and Works, has 
with much skill woven in all the threads of circumstance 
and character. These would take too much of our waning 
space ; but I place the references below, 1 limiting myself to 
one authenticated anecdote, viz. that young Fergusson was 
accustomed to assemble the servants who had been detained 
from public worship, and taking his stand at the mouth of 
the peat-stack, would address them for an hour at a time in 
language so eloquent and fervid that Mr. Forbes (the Poet's 
cousin) distinctly remembered to have often seen them 
bathed in tears (Forbes MSS.). 

All this having been so, it is impossible to dismiss the 
end and issue of this visit, as the descendants of this 
uncle attempted to do, as mere hearsay; but this, in so far as 
I am concerned, does not involve doubt of the veracity of 
John Forbes's grandson, my correspondent, in the statement 
he gave me. A contretemps of boyish mischievousness and 
thoughtlessness in the Round Lichnot wood I accepted and 
accept as the occasion of summary dismissal and departure. 
I concede further that it must have been annoying and pro- 
vocative of hot words to the very ' proper ' and pompous 
factor-gentleman in the special circumstances of his high- 
placed guests. But the damning truth remains that, when 
it would have been no great stretch of fraternal generosity 
to have invited his widowed sister to some small cottage 
at Round Lichnot or Forrester-hill, with some little help 
in addition to her own native industry, he never did so 
invite. Again, the fact that the 'threadbare' or 'shabby 
clothes' offended his sense of respectability suggests that 
surely he might have called in the village tailor to provide 

1 Miller's collected Tales and Sketches ; Gordon in Gentleman's 
Magazine, vol. 277. 



72 FAMOUS SCOTS 

his nephew with a suit of clothes. Was that too prodigious 
an expenditure to be thought of? Was his * respectability ' 
not value for the shillings it should have demanded ? Once 
more — the fine thing of young Fergusson preaching at the 
peat-stack mouth with such pathos and power that even the 
hard-headed Aberdonians were melted to tears compels the 
interrogatory, whether that ought not and might not have 
dictated to the uncle a resolution to send his nephew forth- 
with to the College of Aberdeen and to pay his way to 
completing his theological education and ultimate licence 
as a preacher of the gospel ? I believe that the cost was a 
large determining element in leading Fergusson to abandon 
the Kirk. Consequently I have a conviction that had his 
uncle only come forward and said, ' Your father is gone, 
and your mother has not the means, but I shall come good 
for your education — go, and God bless you,' in combination 
with his mother's wistful wish, might have decided him to 
return to his allegiance. 

I have also to state now that, shortly after the publication 
of my volume of 185 1, Mr. Forbes of Old Meldrum asked 
my acceptance of a MS. volume entitled ' Trifles light as 
air by the deceased Johnny Grotts, now first published 
by his son, Sir John Barleycorn, Bart.' (1802). I was 
more than surprised to find in this volume not only a 
paper entitled ' Reflections on reading the Life of 
Fergusson by David Irving, A.M.,' and a second or pseudo- 
memoir of Johnny Grotts, entitled ' Life of Johnny Grotts 
in the manner of David Irving, A.M.,' but that with all this 
vituperation and not unjustifiable blame of Irving there is 
no attempt at disproof of the facts stated by Dr. Irving about 
this visit. This is the more noticeable inasmuch as he had 
attempted such disproof, or rather denied that it was other 
than gossip, but on second thoughts apparently even this 
attempt is crossed out by its writer himself. Self-evidently 
he saw that it would not do to risk contradiction of so 
well - authenticated a matter. All he leaves is this 
most unsatisfactory sentence : ' This maternal uncle of 
Fergusson is much out of the reach of injury from authors 
of Irving's respectability' (p. 125). He refers to the 
Inverarity ' Strictures ' in the Scots Magazine, but these 
papers do not gainsay the story of the visit. It must be 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 73 

added that Mr. Forbes is loud in laudation of Fergusson, 
and breaks into rhyme — 

' So Irving works his way ; 
Like prowling tiger, see him crawl along, 
To seize some vot'ry of the bowl and song ; 
His whetted tusks and shiv'ring fangs proclaim 
Death to the Bard who dares to grasp at Fame. 
But vain his efforts — feeble as his pen ; 
His work shall perish, not a wreck remain ; 
The deathless Fergusson his art defies, 
Whilst Irving's phantom shall adorn — hot pies.' 

These follow lines in the key of Sommers's protest against 
Irving's holding up of a ' boy ' for reprobation as if he had 
been a 'hoary-headed sinner.' All clear enough and 
creditable, but unluckily it yields not an atom of disproof 
of the uncle's mean and callous conduct. 

On minor things I insert a few sentences ; e.g. I was told 
by Mr. Forbes that there never was an ' inn ' near Round 
Lichnot, whereas there was such an inn. This, too, is crossed 
out in the MS. Then there is no hint or memorandum in 
all these papers of the alleged after-visits of Mrs. Fergusson, 
which Mr. Forbes in his natural eagerness to defend his 
grandfather sent me, and which I too trustingly accepted 
in 1 850-1 as evidence that she had not felt that her brother 
had ill-used either herself or her son. I have no reason 
to believe in such after-visits or friendship. Contrariwise, 
it is certain that she never forgot or could forget her 
brother's absolute failure to befriend her and her son in 
such a crisis. No single scrap of her writing was among 
all the Forbes MSS., an incredible thing had there been 
either visit or renewal of broken friendship. 

It fires my blood to-day to think how John Forbes acted 
on and on to the tragical end. As we shall learn sorrow- 
fully, even when that tragedy fell, the poor mother was so 
abjectly poor that she had no choice but to allow her ' child 
of genius ' to be removed to the pauper-Bedlam ! It thus 
lies on the surface that John Forbes continued to the bitter 
end unbrotherly, penurious, and callous ; and that his sister 
w T as of the true old-fashioned Scottish independent spirit 
and disdained to make further appeal. 

Dr. Robert Chambers stands alone in seeking to traverse 



74 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the verdict against the uncle. It always goes against the 
grain in me to say one word derogatory or depreciatory, or 
even corrective of this leal-hearted Scot ; for he was a very 
much more intellectual man than those who look down 
upon him and ignorantly undervalue his books. I deem 
it, therefore, only fair to reproduce his defence — 

' The behaviour of Mr. Forbes in the matter just related, has been 
reprobated as ungenerous in the extreme. But it seems questionable 
whether the censure be merited in its full extent. Every man is no 
doubt bound to assist his fellow-men, and more particularly those who 
are connected with his own family, or have other claims to his 
patronage, as far as lies in his power. But it is difficult to fix the 
limits to which his exertions ought in any particular case to be carried. 
It may seem very clear to everyone at the present day, that Fergusson 
was a man of genius, and ought to have been promoted to some office 
which might have conferred independence, at the same time that it left 
him leisure for the cultivation of his literary talents. This was, 
however, by no means so apparent at the period to which we refer, nor 
perhaps at any future period during the poet's lifetime. He presented 
himself in his uncle's house, an expectant of favour, but his expectations 
might not to any ordinary-minded person appear very reasonable. He 
was a young man that had addicted himself to the profitless occupation 
of rhyming : who could tell he was to render himself eminent by it ? 
He could not submit his mind to common business, and had aversions 
that did not appear to rest on any feasible foundation, to certain 
employments which were proposed to him ; and when we consider to 
how close a scrutiny it is reasonable that those who solicit patronage 
should be prepared to submit, it does not seem wonderful that he should 
have been regarded as a young man who was disposed to remain idle, 
and that his friends should have been discouraged from using their 
influence in behalf of one who did not seem willing to do what he could 
for himself. We know few of the circumstances that took place 
during Fergusson's residence with his uncle, and it is unjust to deal out 
reproaches so much at random ' {Eminent Scotsmen, s.n.). 

It requires only to recall the facts and to disentangle a 
perfect jumble of their chronology, to set all this un- 
characteristically ungenerous special pleading aside. The 
worst thing about it is that whilst defending 'reproaches 
at random,' — reproaches that are not 'at random,' but 
based on authenticated facts, — this extenuation of John 
Forbes's conduct is based on ' random reproaches ' of 
Fergusson and Fergusson's defenders that have not a shadow 
of foundation. 

To begin with, Fergusson hastened North within a few 
weeks of closing his attendance at the University, which we 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 75 

saw took place formally in December 1768. Did this 
look like the irresolution with which he is charged ? More 
than that — this setting out in mid-winter of a delicate lad 
(turned seventeen) indicates not aimlessness but aim, and 
not unwillinghood to be employed but eagerness to find 
employment. 

Then the chronology of statement is utterly wrong. 
The alleged proposals for employment that he is made 
hypothetically to reject, and which rejection is further 
alleged to have proved him ' unwilling to submit his mind 
to common business and a wish to remain idle ' came after 
the visit, not preceding — as we shall see in our next chapter. 
Besides, the very fact that he had almost instanter gone 
North to his uncle, in the perfect knowledge of this uncle's 
abundant functions, demonstrated his preparedness and 
eagerness to 'submit his mind to common business,' and 
to exert himself to his utmost toward earning a living for 
himself and his beloved mother. As to having engaged in 
the ' profitless occupation of rhyming ' it is an outrage on 
all amenities of criticism to so over-magnify his college little 
skits and satires and to make them antedate that poetic 
outburst that did not come until two full years after the 
visit — as shall also appear. 

Sorrowfully, therefore, but with a clear and clean con- 
science, I pronounce John Forbes, Esq., of Templeton, 
Hillockhead, Wellhead, Round Lichnot, Forrester-hill, and 
at least four factorships, to have been mean-souied and 
hard. Hugh Miller has come before us in our narrative. 
How differently did his two uncles — ' Sandy ' and ' James ' 
— act towards him ! 

The ugly thing therefore must stand. Nor is it hazarding 
too much to say that John Forbes, gentleman-farmer, 
should have said Amen to Elia's wise fooling on ' Poor 
Relations ' : — 

'A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature — a piece of 
impertinent correspondency — an odious approximation — a haunting 
conscience — a preposterous shadow lengthening on the noontide of 
our prosperity — an unnatural remembrancer — a perpetually recurring 
mortification — a drain on your purse — a more intolerable dun upon 
your pride — a drawback upon your success — a rebuke to your rising — 
a stain on your blood — a blot on your 'scutcheon,' etc. etc. {Last 
Essays). 



76 FAMOUS SCOTS 

The early biographers state that on recovering from the 
fatigues and sickliness of his long foot-journey from the 
North, Fergusson soothed his injured feelings by composing 
his English poems entitled ' The Decay of Friendship ' and 
'Against Repining at Fortune.' Bishop Gleig, as before, 
finds the unhappy visit reflected in them ; and so Irving 
and Sommers and others. I cannot but think this most 
improbable. Had these flat and commonplace productions 
been so inspired (but inspiration there is none), they must 
have shown some passion as well as sensibility, or I will put 
it bluntly — temper. Our Poet did not lack a pungent 
vocabulary. He could be stinging. But these two poems 
are as stingless as drone bees, and bear evidence on the 
surface of a wholly different set of circumstances. 



CHAPTER VII 

HOME AGAIN — DRUDGERY 

1 Fortune's cauld and changefu' ee 
Gloomed bitterly on mine and me.' 

William Thom. 

When footsore and sicker at heart than even in body 
Robert Fergusson again crossed the threshold of his 
mother's humble dwelling in 'Jamieson's Land,' it must 
have been in weariness of spirit and as looking out on a 
grey and windy sky. We can conceive her as cut to the 
heart by her brother's treatment of her ' laddie,' but too 
natively strong and self-reliant to give way to either 
complaint or murmuring. I very much mistake my 
reading of the incidental notices that we gather from her 
son's early biographers if she did not also impart to him 
something of her own indomitable brave - heartedness. 
She was godly after the finest type of old-fashioned Scottish 
godliness. My own words return upon me. Her watchword 
under all disappointment, darkness, vanishing of hopes, and 
ceaseless toil, beyond all question would be that of the 
apostle, 'All things work together for good to them that 
love God ; ' and she gave the supreme evidence of that 
'love' whereon the 'good' is conditioned — a gracious 
and beautiful life of faith and hope and love. It is a joy 
to me even at this far-on day to remember the emotion 
with which that delightful example of the old Scottish 
gentlewoman — the venerable Miss Ruddiman — always 
spoke of mother and son, and not less tenderly of the 
former than the latter. ' She was a good woman,' was 
her emphatic testimony. 

His return from the North was a crisis in Fergusson's 
young life. There was lifelong peril if a decision were not 

77 



78 FAMOUS SCOTS 

arrived at toward earning 'daily bread.' For it abides 
true to-day as when Chaucer wrote in his ' Troilus ' — 

' For to every wight some goodly aventure 
Som tyme is shape, if he can it receyven ; 
And if that he wol take of it no cure 
When that it cometh, but wilfully it weyven, 
Lo ! neither eas nor fortune him deceyven, 
But right his verray slouthe and wrechednesse 
And such a wight is for to blame, I gesse.' 

'Wrechednesse' assuredly, but no 'slouthe,' belonged to 
Fergusson. 

I fear that it would be vain to acquit him of temporary 
irresolution, of infirmity of will, of day-dreaming. But these 
are just the things which circumstance controls. Psycholo- 
gically, in estimating character, I hold that it is as illogical 
as it is unkind to ' blame ' — Chaucer's word — a man of genius 
for his temperament. As well ' blame ' a man who has lost 
his legs that he cannot be a cavalry soldier, or any victim 
of any physical loss or defect that he is unable to fulfil the 
functions for which the missing limbs or faculties are the 
appointed instruments, as ' blame ' Fergusson that he had 
aversions in relation to preparatory studies and life-tasks 
that were suggested to him. We have no such blame for 
the physical ; why for the mental or moral ? 

This is our next point of departure needing right setting ; 
for here Irving and the sorry crew of moralisers have again 
poisoned and misled judgment. 

On his return — I re-emphasise that it was on return and 
not before it — from his visit to his uncle, it was proposed 
that he should turn his academic training to account by 
attending medical classes at Edinburgh University. His 
answer was that he could not, for when he read or thought 
of diseases he seemed to feel as if every one of them were 
assailing him. Fantastic ? Yes, it has been ridiculed ; 
and yet as matter of fact, identically the same thing is 
recorded of one of whom few will be fools enough to laugh 
— the illustrious scholar and divine, John Bois, D.D., one 
of the leading translators of our Authorised Version of Holy 
Scripture. His biographer thus writes of him — 

1 He once proposed to have imployed his Studies in Physick ; to 
which End hee purchased many Books in that Faculty. Till in 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 79 

Reading of them he was conceited, that whatsoever Disease he read 
of, he was troubled with the same himself. By which sickness of the 
Brain, it pleased God to cure the Church of the Want of so good a 
Member as he afterwards proved ' (Peck). 

It were easy to multiply similar parallels. Fergusson was 
of too sickly a constitution to overcome his sensations and 
revulsions. But besides this, where was the money to come 
from during the long probation ? I think of the hardships 
in the medical-preparations of Goldsmith and of Smollett ; 
and ' Gideon Gray ' in the Surgeon } s Daughter also comes 
in mind. 

So with Law. It is stated by his early biographers, e.g. 
Thomas Ruddiman and Irving, that he was not only 
invited but induced to attempt legal studies, but that he 
speedily gave up the attempt. Such alleged abandonment 
was vindicated on the ground that so 'dry and barren a 
study as law was wholly improper' for one so tremulous 
with sensibility and so impulsive. Whereupon good Bishop 
Gleig proves to his own satisfaction by certes very original 
examples, that poetical genius is not at all incongruous with 
legal studies. I daresay he was right in the fact, but fancy 
the great lawyer-judge Mansfield and the famous Bishop of 
Rochester (Atterbury) being selected as proofs that they 
could have been poets {/"they had chosen ! I grant that the 
defence of Fergusson on the plea that Law was too ' dry ' 
was a poor one. But the real reason — as with Medicine 
and Theology — lay deeper. Again one inevitably asks and 
re-asks, suppose Fergusson to have acquiesced, where were 
to be got the means of support during the interval ? 

As to his not being prepared to submit to the necessary 
'drudgery,' the weary, dreary, wearing drudgery to which 
he did submit forthwith, vindicates him, and proves how 
unrighteous and unsympathetic and un-understanding are 
the misjudgments stated. Hence I have a remorseful 
feeling for having quoted Chaucer. For if his wight's 
1 w r rechednesse ' w T as all too certainly due to his 'slouthe,' 
that could not be laid to Fergusson's charge, as we have 
seen. 

I plead with every kindly reader to hold in recollection 
my psychological problem and also the breadth of shadow 
that must have fallen athwart heart and hearth from the 



80 FAMOUS SCOTS 

shattering of his golden hopes from, it cannot be too often 
iterated, his well-advantaged uncle. 

With reference to Dr. Robert Chambers's proleptic data 
that I have had to confute, I again place in the forefront 
that it was on coming back to Edinburgh that these 
theological, medical, and legal propositions were made to 
Fergusson, and that while multiplied things were sug- 
gested, no hand was reached out to enable him to go in 
for any one of them all. The stern necessity of earning a 
living wage (apart from inevitable aversions) put them out 
of the question. 

So far from wishing to remain ' idle,' or being ' unwilling 
to help himself,' the whole facts go to establish that he 
must instantly have addressed himself to find employment. 
At this distance of time and in our dim light we write under 
disadvantage in not knowing the efforts which he made, 
but, placing this and that together, it is certain that he was 
early in the summer of 1769, and therefore within a few 
weeks of recovery from his feverish fatigue on reaching 
home from the North, actually earning a scanty but real 
wage, very much as his poor struggling father had done in 
addition to his posts with Walter Fergusson and the British 
Linen Company. Friends of his deceased father came to 
that rescue which his uncle had withheld — one in particular, 
as the Inverarity MSS. showed me, his father's employer, 
the just re-named Walter Ferguson ; and another — still 
more important and influential, Charles Abercrombie, Esq., 
Depute Commissary-Clerk of the Commissary-Clerk's office, 
Edinburgh. 

This Mr. Abercrombie was of a clerical family from 
William Fergusson's own parish of Tarland, his father 
the parish minister; and it was pleasant to me to come 
on this recognition of birthplace ties. Nevertheless, and 
while grateful to both these Edinburgh citizens, it is 
pitiful to think that the richly-gifted son had so to follow 
in his father's footsteps, footsteps literally, by becoming 
a clerk and copyist of legal papers — by the latter gaining 
his father's designation of 'Writer' and Burns's immortal 
phrase, 'the Writer chiel, a deathless name.' 

Those who have ignominiously laughed — and to his 
shame our revered Dr. Samuel Johnson did it — at John 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 81 

Milton's taking up a small private school on his high- 
hearted hastened return from Italy, that he might be at 
the post of danger in his country's troubles, may jeer and 
sneer at Robert Fergusson's occupation. The man who 
is a man will not jeer. 

The Commissary - Clerk's office, which proved to be 
Fergusson's only permanent post till the close of his brief 
life, belonged to what are known as the Commissary Courts. 
These were set up both in Edinburgh and the provinces 
after the Reformation, to take the place of the old 
ecclesiastical courts. Their special functions related to all 
that concerned marriage, divorce, legitimacy, and wills ; 
besides which bonds and other deeds were recorded in the 
Commissary office for execution, just as in the Court of 
Session and Sheriff Courts — the Church courts having of 
old been in the habit of enforcing civil claims by Church 
censures. 

The Commissary Records consist of three main branches, 
the Register of Testaments, of Deeds, and of Legal 
Decreets. I have recently gone over the ' Deeds,' and 
found many and many a folio page beautifully and flawlessly 
written by Fergusson. I designate one very good example. 
Decreet for Declarator of Marriage Adherence and Aliment 
Mary Galloway against David Laidlaw, 13 Sept r . 1769, 12 
Cases (Vol. xii. 1769-71). 

A paper printed in a recent number of the Scottish 
Antiquary (1897) states that in 1741 the Commissary 
Clerkship of Edinburgh was divided between two persons, 
each of them getting about ,£200 a year, and that the 
Commissary-Clerk Depute got about ;£ioo a year. The 
amounts cannot be stated precisely, as they consisted of 
fees paid for registration or by litigants, and not salaries 
at all. These summary details — for which I am mainly 
indebted to J. Maitland Thomson, Esq., M.A., Advocate — 
reveal how mechanical and monotonous must have been 
our Poet's duties while — in Charles Lamb's phrase — he 
underwent ' the daily drudgery at the desk's dead wood,' 
while the ^100 income of the Deputy-Clerk's office goes far 
to mitigate our attitude toward his meagre payment of 
Fergusson. 

The Commissary-Clerk's office was situated in Parliament 
6 



82 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Close — using the term here as in English cathedral closes 
— so that the whole characters and ongoings of the Court 
of Session were hourly day by day beneath our Poet's eyes. 
Angellier, in his for a Frenchman semi-miraculous Bitr?is, 
has worked in mainly from Fergusson's ' Rising ' and 
'Sitting' of the Session, the 'Daft Days,' 'Leith Races,' 
and other vernacular poems, a finely realistic picture of 
the then streets of Edinburgh, whilst the etchings of John 
Kay and Walter Geikie enable us to see the very 'form 
and pressure ' of the scenes and to realise how true as any 
Dutch painter to the life are Fergusson's presentations. 
But the very brilliance and animation of the after-poetry 
makes it, so to say, de trop to return on his wage-earning 
employment. That employment, as must by this time be 
recognised, was miserably inferior to Fergusson's abilities 
and culture, but the daily spectacle of his slaving and 
impoverished mother left him no choice. And so with 
the exception of a few months at similar duties in the 
Sheriff-Clerk's office, which as soon as possible he left 
from being distressed by the perpetual issuing there of 
executions of sale, the Commissary-Clerk's office proved 
to be his stated and only source of regular bread-winning. 
I say 'regular,' as meaning certain, because in addition 
Mr. Abercrombie and others were accustomed to employ 
him in copying legal and other papers of his and their 
private practice. What his salary or weekly wage in 
the Commissary-Depute's office was, I have failed to dis- 
cover; but I am about to produce pathetic documentary 
proof of the financial meagreness of recompense for his 
extra-copying and writing of letters, etc., for any who applied. 
He began his duties for Mr. Abercrombie by making a 
fair transcript — just as he had done with Professor William 
Wilkie's lectures — of the great official Register, id est an 
elaborate record of all its transactions. 

The following extracts from memoranda, which Fergusson 
has entered in the blank leaves of the MS. of his father's Book 
of Rates, sufficiently and touchingly indicate the nature of his 
additional employments and their product — the double fact 
reminding us of on the one hand the illustrious Jonathan 
Edwards of America writing his great sermons on all manner 
of odds and ends and saved scraps of paper, and on the 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 



83 



other of poor Chatterton's almost contemporaneous cynical 
notes of his slender literary gains, as touchingly told by Skeat, 
Wilson, and Masson. The entries are headed Memoranda. 



I. Record. 

Decreet of divorce, Pirie g. Backie, 30 . . £0 

Decreet adherence, Galloway g. Laidlas, 24 . o 

Decreet divorce, PA Keil g. White, 12 . . o 

Divorce, Paterson g. Ramsay, 9 . . . o 
Divorce, Chalmers against Marr, 50 



Decreet divorce, Thomson g. Laurie, 22 

II. Cash Account. 

For writing depositions . 

For do. 

For registering protests . 

For writing an infeftement 

For an eik .... 

For writing answer to the petition, James Sim 

Edinburgh, nth October 1770. 
For a testament, umq 1 . Daniel M'Don 
For a testament, umq 1 . Adam Edmond . 

III. 

For a testament, umq 1 . James Veitch 
For transcribing an account 



Amount of Cash, 18th October 1770 
Received for the Record . 



IV. 

For writing Brodie's inventory, is. 

For a sheet of stamp paper, is. in part. 

For do., is. 

For writing Euphemia Dalrymple's testament, is. 6d. 

V. 

Testament testamentar, umq 1 . Alexander Veitch, 14. 
Testament testamentar, umq 1 . Adam Edmond, 10, P d . 
Testament dative, umq 1 . Lilias Weir, 5, P d . 
Testament dative, umq 1 . Alexander Veitch, 16s. 



3 ih 

2 6 

1 3 
o u£ 



5 


2* 


£0 13 
2 



71 


£0 15 


7h 



£0 


2 








1 











6h, 





2 


6 





1 











6 


£0 


7 


6i 








9 





1 


6 







2 
O 



6 


£0 



4 
7 


9 
8* 


£0 



12 
13 


Si 



£1 



5 
8 


6 


£1 


13 


»i 



84 FAMOUS SCOTS 

VI. 

Testament dative, umq 1 . Euphemia Dalrymple. 

Test, dative, Margar. Duncan, 14. 

Test, dative, Captain Waulker, 6. 

Test, dative, John Mowatt, 27. 

Tes*. testamentar, Agnes Brash, 12. 

Test, testamentar, Skirving, 13. 

Test. test 1 . Marion Hogg, 10. 

Test, dative, James Cairnes. 

(Works, 1 85 1, pp. lxxiii-iv. ) 

These are dry figures, but to me they gleam with pathos. 
Think of the farthing, 1 1 |d. ! For they go to re-demonstrate 
how far astray was Mr. Ruddiman when he moralised that 
' a genius so lively could not submit to the drudgery of the 
dry and sedentary profession of the Law.' 

The preceding memoranda establish that he must have 
mastered the legal terms and forms necessary to the pre- 
paration of the testaments and other legal documents ; and 
over against the charge of not submitting to drudgery I write 
large, what drudgery could have been more irksome, more 
exacting than his routine employment and those after office- 
hours copyings, etc. ? How offensive and hard again is 
Bishop Gleig's inflation of the earlier mis-observations ! — 
1 Mr. Fergusson, with many amiable qualities, was so utterly 
destitute of mental vigour that rather than submit to what 
his friends call drudgery, he seemed to have looked with 
a wistful eye to some sinecure place.' Which being inter- 
preted means either of two things — that he had gone to 
his uncle not really wishing employment — a proved false- 
hood — or that given an opportunity and means to study the 
Law he would not apply himself or submit to the necessary 
labour — a pure fiction. Then, in the teeth of the facts, 
Mr. Ruddiman's unlucky term of ' drudgery ' is flung back 
on him, unmindful of and untouched by the actual ceaseless 
and monotonous and miserably under-paid toil to which 
without break he gave himself for the term of his short 
natural life. No. Robert Fergusson was never given a 
chance of reaching a position worthy of him. And so day 
in and day out he was thankful and strenuously diligent 
to the last in copying law papers and anything, anything 
that offered for 'daily bread.' 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 85 

In the knowledge of these facts I would have my readers 
keep a grip of this certainty — that he ' kept ' himself reput- 
ably to the close, and never appeared other than well-dressed 
and gentlemanly, never ceasing to share his every shilling 
with his ageing and beloved mother, ay, and with the poor 
in the street or in his ' close ' — as is universally testified. 
Surely this historic-biographic fact and reminder ought to 
crush the calumny of unsubmissiveness to drudgery and 
looking 'with a wistful eye to some sinecure place'? 
Truly and penetratively observes one of his anonymous 
biographers, ' Like others whom accident has thrown into 
a course of life contrary to their inclination, he was pre- 
vented by the pressure of daily necessity from adventuring 
on a better' (Boy's Lives of Scots). 

' Alone the oar he plied, the rapids nigh ; 
To pause but for a moment was to die.' 

It is the more necessary to keep before the mind and 
heart and conscience of the reader Fergusson's unfailing 
attendance and attention to his weary task-work, his inevit- 
able punctuality to the very second at the successive hours, 
and his unbroken friendship with the head of his office, Mr. 
Ab'ercrombie, — a gentleman who, it must be recorded, while 
of great worth, was notoriously peppery, irritable, exacting of 
hard work, as being himself a relentless worker, — because 
an anecdote has passed from biographer to biographer 
that broadens out a single escapade of a single day into a 
generalisation of his habitual attitude toward his office- 
duties. 

The venerable Miss Ruddiman over and over assured 
me that, while unquestionably he felt these duties to be 
irksome and beneath his qualifications, and would sometimes 
speak of his 'aching fingers,' he nevertheless was punc- 
tiliously regular and systematic in going to the office 
and during his office hours, so much so that she had been 
told that his rounding of the corner in proceeding to the 
Commissary-Depute's office was taken by the neighbours 
as better surety of the hour than the Tron Kirk bell. Only 
o' nights, when his day's duties had been discharged, did 
he feel free to scribble, as he jocosely called it. More than 
that, my aged friend maintained — as I have already argued 



86 FAMOUS SCOTS 

— that the fact alone that through five years he succeeded 
in satisfying old Mr. Charles Abercrombie and his successor 
was proof positive that there was no ground for complaint. 
' Mr. Robert,' she would say, ' was a great favourite with 
Mr. Abercrombie, as with everybody, and always took in 
good part good advice given him.' In recollection of these 
things it demands restraint of passion to make room for 
the self-confuting anecdote referred to. As I daresay it 
may be held obligatory on a biographer to preserve it, 
I give it from Chambers, and shall thereafter show its 
contradictions. 

1 The following anecdote has been related for the purpose of showing 
the irksomeness of the poet under his usual avocations. In copying out 
the extract of a deed one forenoon, he blundered it two different times, 
and was at length obliged to abandon the task without completing it. 
On returning in the evening, he found that the extract had been much 
wanted, and he accordingly sat down with great reluctance to attempt 
it a third time. He had not, however, half accomplished his task, when 
he cried out to his office companion, that a thought had just struck him 
which he would instantly put into verse and carry to Ruddiman's 
Magazine (on the eve of publication), but that he would instantly return 
and complete the extract. He immediately scrawled out the following 
stanza on one Thomas Lancashire, who after acting the gravedigger in 
Hamlet and other such characters on the Edinburgh stage, had set up 
a public-house, in which he died — 

"Alas! poor Tom! how oft with merry heart 
Have we beheld thee play the Sexton's part ! 
Each comic heart must now be grieved to see 
The Sexton's dreary part performed on thee." 

On his return towards the office, he called at the shop of his friend 
Sommers, printseller and glazier, in the Parliament Close, where he 
found a boy [Robert Aikman, shop-boy] reading a poem on the 
Creation. This circumstance furnished him with the point of another 
epigram, which he immediately scribbled down and left for Mr. 
Sommers's perusal. These proceedings occupied him about twenty 
minutes, and he then returned to his drudgery ' (Eminent Scotsmen, s.n.). 

This narrative carries on the face of it improbability, or 
rather impossibility. For example, the office never was 
opened in the evening. The epigram sent on the ' eve of 
publication ' was not inserted as a postscript, but in its own 
place with the poetry as ordinarily. The epigram on 
Sommers came a good while subsequent to that on Lanca- 
shire, as he himself tells us, with no connection whatever 
with the other. I add that Robert Fergusson never 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 87 

1 scribbled ' or ' scrawled.' I have seen a good deal of 
his writing, and like his father's it is invariably neat and 
careful. Finally, the Thomas Lancashire epigram did not 
appear in Ruddiman's Magazine until April 16th, 1772, or 
fully two, nearer three years subsequent to his entering the 
Commissary-Depute's office — and so all that interval had 
passed without any such escapade. Nor had he written or 
published any poetry until February 14, 1771. 

But whilst I reject this anecdote I am far from being 
reluctant to admit that some manifestations of impatience 
with his dreary work may have furnished some tiny modicum 
of fact to it. Yet, allowing 'pranks' of the sort, it is 
monstrous to expand and generalise so as to leave the 
impression that Fergusson was so nighty and unbusiness- 
like that he did not lend himself to his duties. 

Contemporaneous with his return to Edinburgh, Fergusson 
formed an acquaintance with several players and musicians 
— as I learned from the Ruddiman MSS. An early fruit 
of this intercourse was a close friendship with Mr. Woods, 
a favourite actor of the Edinburgh boards, and a man of 
unblemished character as a private citizen. More sugges- 
tive still — as it was my privilege first to publish — Tenducci 
became equally his friend — that Tenducci who first directed 
the attention of George Thomson to the Scottish melodies, 
and so indirectly became the originator of his great work, 
and deeper, the securer of the enthusiastic allegiance of 
Robert Burns. It is to be here recorded that to the opera 
of * Artaxerxes,' which was produced in 1769 with many 
attractions in the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, Fergusson 
contributed three songs. This was his first appearance 
as an author. Here is the title-page — 

'Artaxerxes, an English Opera, as it is performed at the Theatre 
Royal, Edinburgh. The Music composed by Tho. Aug. Arne. Mus. 
Doc. With the addition of Three Favourite Scots Airs. The words by 
Mr. R. Fergusson. Edinburgh : Printed by Martin and Wotherspoon. 
MDCCLXIX. Price Sixpence.' 

This is none other than a wretchedly poor translation of 
Metastasio's beautiful play of the name ; and I must allow 
our Poet's three songs are equally inane. Only the ' three 
favourite Scots airs' and Mr. and Madame Tenducci's 
singing and an excellent company could have won the 



88 FAMOUS SCOTS 

amazing popularity that contemporary notices make clear 
was sustainedly won. The Scots airs were 'Braes of 
Ballenden,' for which blind Dr. Blacklock wrote just about 
as poor a song as this ; ' Roslin Castle,' of which Sir Walter 
wrote in Redgauntlet, ' Here's another, " Roslin Castle " ; 
it's no' a Scots tune, but it passes for one. Oswald made it 
himself, I reckon. He has cheated mony a ane, but he 
canna cheat Wandering Willie.' But for once Scott was 
wrong. Oswald did not compose the tune. The third air was 
1 Lochaber no more,' one of Allan Ramsay's best songs, 
and according to Hogg's Jacobite Relics (ii. 434), the song 
sung in the prison of Linlithgow by Dr. Archibald Cameron 
of Lochiel. 

None of these three songs was reclaimed by Fergusson 
for his volume of 1773 or the Magazine. The mystery is 
that the sweet-singer of the ' Lea Rig ' and the racy singer 
of the ballad-song of ' Hallowfair ' could perpetrate such 
trash and seek to displace Ramsay by his ' wersh ' con- 
ventionalisms. Before passing on, it may be mentioned 
that when Tenducci, long years after Fergusson's death, 
spoke of him he broke down and burst into tears. 

The fact that Fergusson was asked, so early as 1769, to 
furnish these songs for ' Artaxerxes,' gives assurance that 
his poetic gift was known, while their being sung by the 
Tenduccis could hardly fail to put his name in men's 
mouths. True, it was a change for the umquhile student in 
divinity to be thus associated with players and stage singers. 
But let it be remembered he had unmistakably announced 
his abandonment of the sacred calling. 

Mr. J. C. Dibdin, the historian of the Scottish Stage, 
informs me that Fergusson had a special private box near 
the stage, that he might come and go as he chose, and that 
he was often melted to tears. Miss Ruddiman also informed 
me that she was present at one performance of ' Artaxerxes ' 
with the Poet, and remembered how he blushed when his 
name was applauded. She further said he had a peculiar 
method of expressing his applause by raising his right hand 
and bringing it down with a clap. 

We have now reached the highest level of Robert Fergus- 
son's life — his advent as a vernacular poet. This must 
have a chapter to itself. 



CHAPTER VIII 

ADVENT AS A VERNACULAR POET — A ' NEW NOTE ' 

' Harp of the North . . . 
Silent be no more. Enchantress, wake again.' 

Scott. 

I have named the point at which we have arrived, the highest 
level of Fergusson's young life, and my other words, 'his 
advent as a vernacular poet,' will justify me to all who know. 
For in 1772 a new light broke upon him, comparable at a 
distance with that which darted across the shrouded horizon 
of Robert Burns when Dr. Thomas Blacklock's letter came 
to his knowledge and sent him from Mossgiel to Edinburgh. 

As we saw, he had flung off satires in Macaronic and 
other mother-tongued verse while at St. Andrews, that have 
perished, and one — the Elegy on Professor David Gregory — 
not likely to perish, so that he had 'imp'd his wing for 
flight ' into the empyrean of Scottish song — if the term be 
not too exalted. Yet it is the lark that ' soars and sings ' in 
the wide light-drenched skies. 

Except in the little Ode of Horace and the Elegy, we have 
no examples of his boyish verse, and can only guess at 
the quality of some from flaws pointed out in them by 
his clear-headed brother Hary. The most remarkable thing 
about them is that, having written the Horatian Ode and 
the Elegy, he seems to have missed seeing for the time that 
there lay the vein that he was destined to work. That he 
had not yet wholly found himself, though Scotia's Muse 
had found him, lies on the surface. For following the three 
very poor songs in ' Artaxerxes,' wherein he was self-evidently 
unconscious of the opportunity laid to his hand in the ' three 
famous Scots airs ' to employ the rich and racy vernacular 
of Allan Ramsay and Hamilton of Gilbertfield as in the 
Elegy on Gregory, came as his first really published verse, 

89 



90 FAMOUS SCOTS 

English pieces of the most conventional type. This blunder, 
for blunder it was, remained unrectified until, as I have said, 
the opening of 1772. 

In the Weekly Magazine of the Ruddimans — rival of the 
Scots Magazine, that had grown somnolent and ' dry and 
dreich' — of February 7th, 1 77 1, there appeared this note 
under Poetry — 

' We have been favoured with three Pastorals, under the titles of Morn- 
ing, Noon, and Night, written by a young gentleman of this place, the 
stile of which appears as natural and picturesque as that of any of the 
modern ones hitherto published.' 

This note is prefixed to ' Pastoral I. Morning,' and there 
followed on February 14th, 'Pastoral II. Noon,' and on 
February 21st, 'Pastoral III. Night,' still anonymously. 

These Pastorals are scarcely in a single element above 
contemporary namby-pamby known as pastorals that were 
just about being flagellated by Erskine — far-off echoes of 
Pope and Gay and John Cunningham. 

The laudation of them, notwithstanding, in the note, 
might well have misled the youthful Poet to continue in 
the same strain, and so compliments have proved the flatter- 
ing bane of his poetic life by capturing him to furnish what 
was — wanted. 

But fortunately the ill-judged laudation did not seduce 
Robert Fergusson. Nothing further was contributed to the 
Weekly till the autumn of 1771, or about six months 
subsequent to the Pastorals. Then appeared ' A Saturday's 
Expedition : in mock heroicks ' (August 1st), duly signed ' R. 
Fergusson.' This was followed on September 19th by the 
already-named ' Decay of Friendship : a pastoral elegy.' In 
the next month, October 10th, came 'Lines written at the 
Hermitage of Braid, near Edinburgh.' This, too, was 
signed ' R. Ferguson ' — a single ' s ' in this single instance. 
On November 21st there appeared another burlesque, 'A 
Burlesque Elegy on the Amputation of a Student's Hair, 
antecedent to his entering into Orders.' There was thus a 
second hazard of imagining, as I suspect he did imagine, that 
burlesque was his forte. So 1 77 1 closed, and certainly, had 
nothing higher than these separately and collectively been 
given, the name of Robert Fergusson must speedily have 
faded. There is somewhat more verve in the burlesques, 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 91 

even touches of drollery that seem to have caught on, but 
nothing quick. The only thing about them noticeable is 
that the ' Saturday's Expedition ' and the ' Lines written at 
the Hermitage of Braid' inform us that the young Poet 
went out of Warriston's Close to breathe the 'caller air,' 
and perchance he was led to Fifeshire in the ' Saturday's 
Expedition ' in order to combine with it a quiet Sunday in 
the Manse of Anstruther. The late Dr. Nairne — who was 
a fellow-student at St. Andrews — delighted to remember 
Professor Wilkie bringing Fergusson along with him to his 
venerable father's manse; and the friendship was continued. 

Except that such things as his English poems were the 
mode of the period, I am at a loss to understand his 
wasting his poetic gift on such thin and valueless produc- 
tions. For though the smooth and the conventional, as one 
has to reiterate, prevailed and indeed dominated, Scotland 
had not been without occasional singers in the 'auld leid.' 
There was Alexander Ross, with Scottish songs of real vigour 
and go. Mrs. Cockburn's 'Flowers of the Forest' had 
been printed in The Lark in 1765, and Jane Elliot's better 
words, though not printed till 1776, were well known. Lady 
Anne Lindsay told Scott her immortal ' Auld Robin Gray ' 
was born, i.e. composed, 'after the close of 1771.' Other 
blithe Scottish lilts and even long poems by Meston and the 
Forbeses, might be added. So that the mystery is that ' Mr. 
Robert ' was not stirred to emulate. 

At last he was stirred. The year 1772 opened very 
differently from 1769-1771. For on January 2nd a poem 
proclaimed unmistakably that the born heir of Allan Ramsay 
and his ' young gentlemen ' had arrived. Then appeared 
' The Daft Days.' There succeeded, but not till 5th March, 
another vernacular, ' Elegy on the Death of Scots Music' 
The latter only can we find room for in full, but previous 
to so giving it I glean two stanzas from the other — as 
having inspired Skinner's ' Tullocbgorum ' : — 

' Fiddlers ! your pins in temper fix, 
And roset weel your fiddlesticks, 
But banish vile Italian tricks 

From out your quorum, 
Nor fortes wi' pianos mix — 

Gie's Tullochgorum. 



92 FAMOUS SCOTS 

For nought can cheer the heart sae wee 
As can a canty Highland reel ; 
It even vivifies the heel 

To skip and dance : 
Lifeless is he wha canna feel 

Its influence.' 

Now for the — 

Elegy on the Death of Scots Music. 

' On Scotia's plains, in days of yore, 
When lads and lasses tartan wore, 
Saft Music rang on ilka shore, 

In namely weid ; 
But Harmony is now no more, 

And Music dead. 

Round her the feather'd choir would wing, 
Sae bonnily she wont to sing, 
And sleely wake the sleeping string, 

Their sang to lead, 
Sweet as the zephyrs of the Spring ; 

But now she's dead. 

Mourn ilka nymph and ilka swain, 

Ilk sunny hill and dowie glen ; 

Let weeping streams and Naiads drain 

Their fountain head ; 
Let echo swell the dolefu' strain, 

Since Music's dead. 

When the saft vernal breezes ca' 
The grey-hair'd Winter's fogs awa', 
Naebody then is heard to blaw, 

Near hill or mead, 
On chaunter or on aiten straw, 

Since Music's dead. 

Nae lasses now, on simmer days, 
Will lilt at bleaching of their claes ; 
Nae herds on Yarrow's bonny braes, 

Or banks of Tweed, 
Delight to chant their hameil lays, 

Since Music's dead. 

At glomin', now, the bagpipe's dumb, 
When weary owsen hameward come ; 
Sae sweetly as it wont to bum, 

And pibrachs skreed ; 
We never hear its warlike hum, 

For Music's dead. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 93 

Macgibbon's gane : Ah ! waes my heart ! 
The man in music maist expert, 
Wha cou'd sweet melody impart, 

And tune the reed, 
Wi' sic a slee and pawky art ; 

But now he's dead. 

Ilk carline now may grunt and grane, 
Ilk bonny lassie make great mane ; 
Since he's awa', I trow there's nane 

Can fill his stead ; 
The blythest sangster on the plain ! 

Alake, he's dead ! 

Now foreign sonnets bear the gree 

And crabbit queer variety 

Of sounds fresh sprung frae Italy, 

A bastard breed ! 
Unlike that saft-tongu'd melody 

Which now lies dead. 

Can lav'rocks at the dawning day, 
Can linties chirming frae the spray, 
Or todling burns that smoothly play 

O'er gowden bed, 
Compare wi' Birks of Indermay? 

But now they're dead. 

O Scotland ! that cou'd yence afford 
To bang the pith of Roman sword, 
Winna your sons, wi' joint accord, 

To battle speed, 
And fight till Music be restor'd, 

Which now lies dead ? ' 

Said I not well, ' Here is a new note ' ? ' The Daft Days ' 
and the ' Elegy ' are marked with double stars of approba- 
tion by the late Sir William Stirling-Maxwell of Keir in his 
copy of Fergusson — now one of my treasures ; and no one 
who has insight can fail to recognise the humour, the 
drollery, the pat wording of the former or the pathos and 
picturesqueness of the latter. We shall see the ' Elegy's ' 
third stanza expanding in Burns's hands into the great 
' Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson.' 

Only two short vernacular poems appeared in the whole 
15 th volume of Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine ; but sufficient 
to assure Scotland of the dawn of a new renaissance 
destined to advance on the Scottish horizon to a full day. 
Alas ! alas ! brief for its bringer ! 



94 FAMOUS SCOTS 

The next volume — leaving unregistered here and onward 
the English verse — yields us 'The King's Birthday in 
Edinburgh' (June 4th, 1772). Vol. xvii. finds him again 
repeating and reflecting the tinkle-tinkle of John Cunningham, 
oblivious of his ' Kate of Aberdeen ' ; but happily he again 
shook himself free from puerilities and mimicries, and on 
August 27th appeared 'Caller Oysters.' I feel constrained 
again to invite the reader to read and re-read a very few 
representative stanzas from both of these vernacular poems 

The King's Birthday in Edinburgh. 

' I sing the day sae aften sung, 
Wi' which our lugs hae yearly rung, 
In whase loud praise the Muse has dung 

A' kind o' print ; 
But wow ! the limmer's fairly flung ; 

There's naething in't. 

I'm fain to think the joys the same 
In London town as here at hame, 
Whare folk of ilka age and name, 

Baith blind and cripple, 
Forgather aft, O fy for shame ! 

To drink and tipple. 

O Muse, be kind, and dinna fash us, 
To flee awa' beyont Parnassus, 
Nor seek for Helicon to wash us, 

That heath'nish spring ; 
Wi' Highland whisky scour our hawses j 

And gar us sing. 

Begin then, dame, ye've drunk your fill, 
You wouldna hae the tither gill? 
You'll trust me, mair would do you ill, 

And ding you doitet ; 
Troth 'twould be sair agains my will 

To hae the wyte o't.' 



Caller Oysters. 

Whan big as burns the gutters rin, 
Gin ye hae catcht a droukit skin, 
To Luckie Middlemist's loup in, 

And sit fu' snug 
O'er oysters and a dram o' gin, 

Or haddock lug. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 95 

When auld Saunt Giles, at aught o'clock, 
Gars merchant louns their shopies lock, 
There we adjourn wi' hearty fock 

To birle our bodies, 
And get wharewi' to crack our joke, 

And clear our noddles. 

Whan Phoebus did his windocks steek, 
How aften at that ingle cheek 
Did I my frosty fingers beek, 

And taste gude fare : 
I trow there was nae hame to seek 

When steghin there. 

While glakit fools, o'er rife o' cash, 
Pamper their weyms wi' fousom trash, 
I think a chiel may gayly pass, 

He's no ill boden 
That gusts his gabb wi' oyster sauce, 

And hen weel soden.' 

There we have the same broad yet uncoarsened humour, 
the same scintillating wit, the same expressive vocabulary 
throughout. And so it went on. For vol. xviii. more than 
sustained the young Poet's reputation. In it there came 
in rapid succession 'Braid Claith' (October 15, 1772); 
' Geordie and Davie : an Eclogue to the Memory of Dr. 
William Wilkie' (October 29); 'Hallowfair' (November 
12); and 'To the Tron Kirk Bell.' Vol. xix. was even 
more memorable ; for it gave us ' Caller Water ' (January 
2i, 1773); 'Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey, 
in their mother-tongue ' (March 4) ; ' The Rising of the 
Session' (March 18). Vol. xx. still more advances. In it 
came 'Ode to the Bee' (April 29), dated Broomhouse, 
East Lothian; 'The Farmer's Ingle' (May 13); 'The 
Ghaists : a Kirkyard Eclogue' (May 27); 'On seeing a 
Butterfly in the Street ' (June 24). 

I wish I might have reproduced the whole of these. That 
is impossible. I per force content myself with ' Braid Claith ' 
and three stanzas from 'The Farmer's Ingle.' 

Braid Claith. 
' Ye wha are fain to hae your name 
Wrote in the bonny book of fame, 
Let merit nae pretension claim 

To laurel'd wreath, 
But hap ye weel, baith back and wame, 
In gude Braid Claith. 



96 FAMOUS SCOTS 

He that some ells o' this may fa', 
An' slae black hat on pow like snaw, 
Bids bauld to bear the gree awa', 

Wi' a' this graith, 
Whan bienly clad wi' shell fu' braw 

O' gude Braid Claith. 

Waesuck for him wha has nae fek o't ! 
For he's a gowk they're sure to geek at, 
A chield that ne'er will be respekit 

While he draws breath, 
Till his four quarters are bedeckit 

Wi' gude Braid Claith. 

On Sabbath-days the barber spark, 
Whan he has done wi' scrapin wark 
Wi' siller broachie in his sark, 

Gangs trigly, faith ! 
Or to the Meadows or the Park, 

In gude Braid Claith. 

Weel might ye trow, to see them there, 
That they to shave your hafhts bare, 
Or curl an' sleek a pickle hair, 

Wud be right laith, 
Whan pacing wi' a gawsy air 

In gude Braid Claith. 

If ony mettled stirrah grien 
For favour frae a lady's ein, 
He mauna care for being seen 

Before he sheath 
His body in a scabbard clean 

O' gude Braid Claith. 

For, gin he come wi' coat threed-bare, 
A feg for him she winna care, 
But crook her bonny mou' fu' sair, 

An' scald him baith. 
Wooers shou'd ay their travel spare 

Without Braid Claith. 

Braid Claith lends fouk an unco heese, 
Makes mony kail-worms butter-flees, 
Gies mony a doctor his degrees 

For little skaith : 
In short, you may be what you please 

Wi' gude Braid Claith. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 97 

For thof ye had as wise a snout on, 
As Shakespeare or Sir Isaac Newton, 
Your judgment fouk wud hae a doubt on, 

I'll tak' my aith, 
Till they could see ye wi' a suit on 

O' gude Braid Claith.' 

The Farmer's Ingle. 

' Whan gloming grey out o'er the welkin keeks, 

Whan Batie ca's his owsen to the byre, 
Whan Thrasher John, sair dung, his barn-door steeks, 

And lusty lasses at the dighting tire : 
What bangs fu' leal the e'enings coming cauld, 

And gars snaw-tapit winter freeze in vain : 
Gars dowie mortals look baith blyth and bauld, 

Nor fley'd wi' a' the poortith o' the plain ; 

Begin my Muse, and chant in namely strain. 

For weel she trows that fiends and fairies be 

Sent frae the de'il to fleetch us to our ill ; 
That ky hae tint their milk wi' evil eie, 

And corn been scowder'd on the glowing kill. 
O mock na this, my friends ! but rather mourn, 

Ye in life's brawest spring wi' reason clear, 
Wi' eild our idle fancies a' return, 

And dim our dolefu' days wi' bairnly fear ; 

The mind's ay cradled whan the grave is near. 

Peace to the husbandman and a' his tribe, 

Whase care fells a' our wants frae year to year ; 

Lang may his sock and couter turn the gleyb, 
And bauks o' corn bend down wi' laded ear. 

May Scotia's simmers ay look gay and green, 
Her yellow har'sts frae scowry blasts decreed ; 

May a' her tenants sit fu' snug and bien, 

Frae the hard grip of ails and poortith freed, 

And a lang lasting train o' peaceful hours succeed.' 

Vol. xxi. opened delightfully with ' Hame Content : a 
Satire' (July 8, 1773); ' Leith Races' (July 22); 'Ode to 
the Gowdspink ' and to the ' Principal and Professors of the 
University of St. Andrews on their superb treat to Dr. 
Samuel Johnson' (Sept. 2); 'The Election' (Sept. 16); 
' Elegy on John Hogg' (Sept. 23). Vol. xxii. brought ' The 
Sitting of the Session ' (Nov. 4) ; ' A Drink Eclogue ' (Nov. 
n); * To my Auld Breeks ' (Nov. 25); ' Robt. Fergusson's 
Last Will' and its 'Codicil' (Dec. 23). 'Hame Content,' 

7 



9 3 FAMOUS SCOTS 

'Leith Races/ 'Ode to the Gowdspink,' and 'The Elec- 
tion,' I grudgingly leave out, as my available space wanes. 

Curiously enough, while the later poems were running 
their course, Fergusson collected eleven of his Scottish 
poems — not including ' The Farmer's Ingle ' or ' Hame 
Content ' or ' Leith Races ' — in a little volume with engraved 
title-page. 

I have gone forward from January 2, 1772, that I might 
focus attention on the whole of the vernacular poems. The 
'new voice' was instantly recognised. The Scots poems 
were reprinted in every possible magazine and newspaper — 
only the old Scots Magazine jealously holding aloof for a 
while until conquered — as ' by the celebrated Mr. Robert 
Fergusson.' The grave propriety of the Scots Magazine 
was disturbed. Ruddiman's Weekly leapt at a bound to a 
then unparalleled success. The successive numbers were 
eagerly waited and watched for. Coffee-rooms and clubs 
rang with talk of the successive poems. From every nook of 
broad Scotland complimentary letters and verses were re- 
ceived by the jubilant publisher. One of these, by a J. S. 
(probably John Scott, a farmer), thus opened his verse-letter — 

' Is Allan risen frae the deid, 
Wha aft has tun'd the aiten reed, 
And by the Muses was decreed 

To grace the thistle ? 
Na ; Fergusson's cum in his stead 

To blaw the whistle ' 

{Works i 1 85 1, pp. 19-21), 

with much more equally praise-ful. 

Kindred with this was John Mayne of the ' Siller Gun ' 
later in reminiscence, as thus — 

' Blyth hae I seen about the ingle, 
The neighbours a', baith wed an' single, 
Flock round, to hear his verses gingle, 

Frae far an' near, 
(The priest wad aft aniang them mingle, 

An' lean to hear.) 

Had ane been owther wat or weary, 
Or had some dawted scornfu' deary 
Turn'd a' our mirth to blirtin bleery 

Wi' taunts right sour, 
His canty tales would make us cheary 

In ha'f an hour. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 99 

'Twas than, as now, your fame gaed roun' 

To sic a pitch thro' ilka toun, 

That the postboy cou'd nowther soun* 

Nor blaw his horn, 
But heeps o' fouk wad him surroun' 

Be't een or morn. 

An' gin they chanc'd to miss their erran' 
(When ye had gi'en the lads their fairin', 
An' they o' wark had been but spairin' 

At case or press,) 
Hame wad they gang, like ane despairin', 

In sad distress. 

But sair we miss our ain braid measure 
Sin Rabie die't.' 

Throughout Robert Fergusson kept his head. To the 
end, as in the beginning, he remained self-respecting, but 
modest and shy to awkwardness when praised. He knew 
his limitations as well as his powers. Thus, in his off-hand 
verse-answer to John Scott (?), he puts both finely — 

1 Awa', ye wylie fleetchin' fallow ! 
The rose shall grow like gowan yallow, 
Before I turn sae toom and shallow, 

And void of fushion, 
As a' your butter'd words to swallow 

In vain delusion. 

Ye mak my Muse a dautit pet, 
But gin she cou'd like Allan's met, 1 
Or couthie crack and hamely get 

Upo' her carritch, 
Eithly wad I be in your debt 

A pint o' parritch. 



But she maun e'en be glad to jook, 
And play teet-bo frae nook to nook, 
Or blush as gin she had the yook 

Upo' her skin, 
Whan Ramsay or whan Pennicuik 

Their lilts begin.' 

{Works, 1851, pp. 21-25.) 



1 _ 



= measure. 



ioo FAMOUS SCOTS 

It must be emphasised that the disclaimer by Fergusson of 
any comparison of him with Allan Ramsay, or even Dr. 
Alexander Pennicuik (who must have been meant, not 
Alexander Penicuik, a contemporary rhymester), was sincere. 
Miss Ruddiman again and again told me that nothing so 
vexed ' Mr. Robert ' as the reading of letters in his praise as 
they came to the publisher, especially if any strangers were 
present. He would try to snatch them from the reader, 
and when he succeeded would crumple them up and toss 
them into the fire with some such phrase as this, ' These 
flatterers have never read Ramsay's poems,' or, ' I do not 
reckon this praise, it is folly.' He was always uneasy and 
restless when his own productions were being praised, but 
would listen and join in the praises of others cordially. 
My aged friend used to close her sunny memories by 
saying, ' Mr. Robert ' (it was always Mr. Robert) ' was a 
dear, gentle, modest creature ; his cheeks, naturally pale, 
would flush with girlish pink at a compliment.' Surely all 
this is very fine ? 

It is important to keep in mind the chronology of the 
welcome of this advent of a new poet. In many editions 
of the Poems, from Ruddiman's (pt. ii., 1779) strange 
to say, onward to the latest, by Mr. Robert Aitken, M.A. 
(1895, Riverside Press), J. S.'s verse-letter is dated 1773, 
whereas it preceded by nearly a whole year the volume of 
1773, as did also the pseudonymous verse-letters of Dr. 
Andrew Gray. So that the advent was hailed as dis- 
tinctively as Robert Burns's on the publication of the slim 
Kilmarnock octavo of 1786. To my mind the immediate 
welcome is at once creditable to Scotland, and, when 
pondered, extremely suggestive of the difference of the 
always well-educated Scottish 'commonalty' from the 
English yokels, stolid and uneducated. Nor is it without an 
element of pathos. The recognition was by the ' common 
people ' first of all, and passed upward, exactly as with Burns. 
Hence I go beyond even what I have thus far claimed. I 
believe that a consideration of all the facts will convince 
that Robert Fergusson created the demand for the volume 
of 1786. I question if there had been no Robert Fergusson 
— if from Ramsay's death forward English verse, such as it 
was, had usurped the ears of readers, and if there had not 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 101 

been this preparedness — whether that volume would have 
found so prompt fame. 

I said I find pathos in the welcome extended to 
Fergusson. How? Because it reveals how deep-rooted 
was the gladness of the nation on hearing again that too 
long forsaken ' mother - leid.' The interregnum between 
Allan Ramsay and Fergusson's advent in so far as our 
vernacular was concerned was not creditable, to say the 
least. David Hume might have been a Frenchman for his 
language and style. Smollett degraded Scottish life to Eng- 
lish eyes. James Thomson had left the North, and never 
probably wrote one stanza in Scots. Those who remained, 
as was said of Lord Jeffrey, spoke and wrote 'nippity 
nippity ' English. Dr. James Beattie, as we shall see, held 
our vernacular to be too vulgar for poetry ; and yet his own 
Scottish verse-letter to Alexander Ross and his most admir- 
able inserted verse in Mickle's ' There's nae luck about the 
house,' and his single stanza of the ' Ewe and the crookit 
horn,' have outlived the harmonious twaddle of 'The 
Minstrel' (a very few lines excepted). Robert Fergusson 
elected to use his own native tongue. More of this in c. xi. 

I have exhibited thus minutely the successive poems as 
rapidly published from week to week in the Magazine 
through 1772-3, because I have a conviction that only by 
so doing do we get a bird's-eye view, so to say, of the 
Poet's life during this brief and memorable period. On 
the one hand, we have to think of such drudgery day by 
day as we have found, and on the other at leisure hours 
this fecundity and brilliance of poetic faculty vernacularly. 

I have now to return on the little volume of 1773. It 
was early announced. In the Scots Magazine of December 
1772 (vol. xxxiv. 672) the book was advertised thus: 
1 Poems. By Robert Fergusson. 1 vol. 12 mo. 1772. 2s. 6d. 
Drummond and Elliott.' Earlier in the Courant of 16th 
December 1772 this notice had appeared — 

' It is stated that a collection of poetry written by Mr. Robert 
Fergusson, many of whose poems have lately appeared in Ruddiman's 
Weekly Magazine, will be put out shortly. Mr. Fergusson is a true 
poet.' 

In the same newspaper, on 26th September 1773, the 
' Address to the Tron Kirk Bell ' was reprinted, and in the 



102 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Caledonian Mercury of 12th June 1773, 'Braid Claith,' with 
the following note: — 

'This poem exhibits so many qualities of true excellence that we 
quote it entire for our readers, as many persons of polite taste desired 
to see it.' 

I should gladly lay down a gold sovereign to know who wrote 
the sentence, ' Mr. Fergusson is a true poet.' I like to think 
it may have been Henry Mackenzie, who wrote the memor- 
able paper of welcome to Burns. 

The little book cannot have been published — though it 
had been earlier circulated in private gift-copies — until the 
close of 1773. As Drummond and Elliott were not the 
publishers, I record at this point that they were the 
receivers of subscription-papers. I have seen several of 
these, and against the names jQi, is. and upwards was written 
in. The Ruddimans published the 1773 volume, and I was 
delighted to find not only these subscription-papers, but a 
memorandum to the effect — contrary to Dr. Robert 
Chambers and all his biographers except myself — that he 
pocketed a clear fifty pounds, or double what Robert Burns 
did by his Kilmarnock volume. There were a few large- 
paper copies struck off. I had once one of them, and it 
ranged exactly with my set of the 1786 Burns, Sillar and 
Lapraik, Little and Turnbull, whereas the ordinary is a 
small duodecimo. 

Several gift-copies must also have been prepared for the 
Author, and, as before stated, circulated by private gift. 
All that I have seen are finely bound in full calf and daintily 
touched with gold and gold roses along the back. 

I pause a few moments to chronicle two such inscribed 
copies as representative of seven traced. 1 The most notice- 
able was a presentation to his High School schoolfellow, 
James Boswell. Its inscription is as follows : — 

1 To James Boswell Esq. the Friend of Liberty and Patron of Science ; 

the following Efforts of a Scottish youth are respectfully 

presented by his most obedient and very humble 

serv*-. R. Fergusson.' 

1 I can only record the others : (1) Dyce Library to Rev. Mr. Welsh ; 
(2) British Museum — Hogg's copy, with pen-sketch of a dog pursuing 
a hare ; (3) To Alexander Kidd — who only died in 1844 ; (4) David 
Herd's ; (5) Earl of Glencairn's. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 103 

No trace of acknowledgment from Boswell has been 
happed on, but the fact that the little book was taken to 
Auchinleck and carefully preserved there as well by the 
Boswell as by Sir Alexander, a genuine Scottish poet, 
permits us to indulge the hope that he did recognise the 
giver and old schoolfellow at the High School. 

Another gift-copy is in Lord Rosebery's priceless collec- 
tion of editions of Fergusson and everything possibly 
obtainable on him and his poetry — far and away the 
richest and most noticeable known. 

1 To the honorable 

Alexander Murray Esq. 
of Murrayfield, — as a small 
mark of Gratitude for his 
Patronage & Beneficence : 
The following juvenile productions 
are respectfully presented by 
his much obliged humble servt. 

R. Fergusson. 
Edin r . 14th Jan3\ 1773.' 

This was (afterwards) the judge Lord Henderland, who, be 
it noted, prior to his elevation to the Bench was one of the 
Commissary Court wherein the Poet wrote. 

I hope it will be conceded that I have fulfilled the head- 
ing of this chapter, ' Advent of a new vernacular Poet.' I 
hope, too, I have said sufficient to win praise for the com- 
nonalty of Scotland not less than for their social superiors 
for their instantaneous welcome to the young Poet — their 
gladsome absorption of what must have been an exception- 
ally large edition, probably four times over Burns's volume 
of 1786. 

One has only to realise the conditions of literary property, 
with copyright practically null and an income from author- 
ship quite out of the question until Robertson, Hume, 
and Hugh Blair obtained their astonishing payments, to 
appreciate the ^50 that was derived from the volume of 
1773. ^ must also be stated, on the authority of Miss 
Ruddiman, confirmed by the Ruddiman MSS. put into my 
hands, that exclusive of this, the Ruddimans were ac- 
customed to hand to Fergusson regular payments for his 
poems as they appeared from week to week, and from 
1 77 1-2 the Poet had a gift of two suits of clothes — one for 



104 FAMOUS SCOTS 

week-days and one for Sundays. Memoranda also go to 
prove that he received from time to time money and book- 
gifts from admirers. 

It is thus certain that Burns and others exaggerated his 
poverty. ' Starve ' is a much too strong word, just as Ben 
Jonson's account of Spenser's death is a gross exaggeration. 
If in some of the poor English poems there are plaints of 
straits, his ' Damon to his Friends ' is bright and hopeful and 
grateful. We should gladly have exchanged it for as many 
lines or stanzas in 'gude braid Scots,' for it is in the wretched 
manner of John Cunningham, but biographically it is 
pleasing reading. I give here a few of its brighter stanzas — 

' Dame Fortune and I are agreed ; 

Her frowns I no longer endure ; 
For the goddess has kindly decreed 
That Damon no more shall be poor. 

Now riches will ope the dim eyes, 

To view the increase of my store ; 
And many my friendship will prize 

Who never knew Damon before. 

Attend, ye kind youth of the plain ! 

Who oft with my sorrows condoled ; 
You cannot be deaf to the strain, 

Since Damon is master of gold.' 

{Works, 1 85 1, pp. 202-3.) 

Before closing this chapter, it is necessary to put aside 
another of Irving's slanders that after - biographers have 
credulously accepted. He cruelly maligns Fergusson, in 
seeking — and he does seek — to leave the impression that 
the jQs° °f 'gold' thus so pathetically magnified, was a 
curse rather than a blessing, that forthwith the 'drouthy,' 
' dissipated ' Poet spent it in ' riotous living.' It is an 
abominable falsehood. When I read the passage to Miss 
Ruddiman, her eyes filled with tears and a tremble came into 
her voice, — she was then nearing ninety, — and rising to her 
feet she said with emphasis, ' No, sir, it is most untrue. I 
see Mr. Robert before me at this moment at the close of 
1773, and I remember clearly the dear boy's delight as he 
tinkled the guineas and said, " My poor good mother shall 
have her full share." ' And so it was, as Mrs. Fergusson 
with a full heart after he was gone, told them all. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 105 

It is shocking to discover the twist that Irving's gossip- 
gathered falsehoods have given to the facts in nearly all 
after ' Lives,' leading them to put the worst and imaginary 
constructions on the most innocent actions. Such 'con- 
scientious malevolence,' as Gaston Boissier said of the 
German treatment of Cicero's Letters, is scarcely forgivable. 

To round off Fergusson's authorship, I add here that in 
1774 he was persuaded to write and publish a Lament for 
John Cunningham. It is in no way remarkable, but was 
printed in a handsome quarto by the royal printer Kincaid. 



CHAPTER IX 

SOCIETY OF THE PERIOD — CONVIVALIA — CORRECTIVE 
STATEMENTS AND APOLOGIA 

' I look for howfs I kenn'd lang syne, 
Whar gentles used to drink gude wine 
And eat cheap dinners.' 
SCOTT {Epilogue to drama of St. Ronan's Well). 

We have now to discuss a complex moral problem. 
His advent as a new-note Poet, like that of Robert Burns, 
lifted him suddenly from friendless, or all but friendless, 
obscurity into the very blaze of day, or unmetaphorically 
with the appearance of 'The Daft Days,' 'Elegy on 
the Death of Scots Music,' 'The King's Birthday in 
Edinburgh,' and 'Caller Oysters ' of 1772, his society was 
eagerly sought by Society. As we have seen, with 'line 
upon line,' he kept steadfastly to his monotonous drudgery 
during the office-hours of the Commissary-Depute's desk. 
Never was there a breath of fault-finding on that. But 
when the day's task was done and the doors were closed, he 
was literally 'seized' by manifold admirers of nearly all 
ranks and kinds. True — just again as with Robert Burns's 
retiring from the presence of duchesses, nobles, learned 
professors, clergy, to John Richmond's ' room ' in Baxter's 
Close, Lawnmarket, for which he paid three shillings a week 
— he had to return to ' Jamieson's Land ' and ' Warriston's 
Close ' when the time for parting came. But none the 
less we must remember he was ' taken out ' by the bailies 
and lawyers, the shopkeepers and young bucks ; and, once 
more like Robert Burns, it was discovered by one and all 
that Robert Fergusson as a conversationalist, as a humorist, 
as a waggish wit, as a ' fellow of infinite jest,' was equal to 
the best of them, could hold his own with the wittiest and 

106 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 107 

wisest, and so entertain that the hours sped often too far 
on in the mornings. These gatherings, as did almost all 
social gatherings of the period, took place mainly in the 
clubs, taverns, ale-houses, and oyster -cellars of ' Auld 
Reekie.' Has our Poet not set it all forth, in his 'Caller 
Oysters,' at Luckie Middlemist's 'howff,' as we saw? 

Pleasant Hunter of Blackness has similarly put it of 
Johnny Dow's — 

'A' ye wha wis' on e'enings lang 
To meet, an' crack, an' sing a sang, 
An 1 weet your pipes for little wrang 
To purse or person. ' 

Be Fergusson's own words marked — 'birle our bodies? A 
bodle was the one-sixth of an English penny, and I accentuate 
this because it was used by Fergusson not simply as an 
apt rhyme-word, but as the exact matter of fact, that the 
expenditure was very small — rarely beyond sixpence — and 
so prima facie evidence that alleged ' wasterliness ' and 
1 dissipation ' and all the rest of Irving's malignant as 
false vocabulary, carry absurdity in them. More of this 
anon, for this only concerns the individual — that is, Robert 
Fergusson — in so far as his own personal spending went, 
whether on ' caller oysters,' or on Luckie Middlemist's or 
Johnny Dow's ale. But beyond these sittings with ' hearty 
fock,' as beyond the inner circle of the ' twa or three ' 
congenial friends with whom it was the Poet's delight to 
meet and by ' cracks ' and singing of Scotland's ' auld 
sangs ' with that dulcet voice of his, there was the Society 
— not exactly the ' upper ten ' in present-day sense, yet 
higher socially than Fergusson — of which I spoke in the 
outset of this chapter. To understand the temptations, the 
fascinations, the overcoming forces, the victimising allure- 
ments into which he was thus suddenly plunged, and had to 
resist and did resist, it is profoundly necessary to get at 
the facts of the Convivalia, or, as Sir Walter phrases it, the 
' High-jinks,' on ' Saturday nicht at e'en,' — as immortalised 
in Waverley and Redgauntlet, — with Dandie Dinmont, and 
1 the cam-stane ' in the entry, and the wild licence over the 
' tappit hen ' of the lawyers — ay, judges. The most superficial 
acquaintance with the facts would have closed the mouths 
of your David Irvings and Bishop Gleigs and their followers 



108 FAMOUS SCOTS 

in perfunctory second and third hand knowledge. On this 
Dr. Robert Chambers wrote wisely and sympathetically 
thus — 

' The convivialities of Fergusson have been generally described as 
bordering on excess and as characterising him in particular, amidst a 
population generally sober. The real truth is, that the poor poet [I 
intercalate not ' poor poet ' any more than ' lame preacher ' of the 
well-known anecdote] indulged exactly in the same way, and in general 
to the same extent, as other young men [ay, and old men, I again 
intercalate, and these clergy, judges, gentry] of that day ' {Eminent 
Scotsmen, s.n.). 

I go farther than this. The facts which I have probed to 
the bottom satisfy me that, so far from being habitual, 
Fergusson's ' falls ' — accepting the word — were outbreaks 
under the spell of congenial intellectual associates, kin with 
but not so terrible as Thomas Carlyle's old schoolmaster's, 
John Orr. The differentiation as between the ' other young 
men ' of Chambers and this young man was that they were 
not only minus his genius but 7tiinus his penitence as well 
and his pathetic retreats to escape and deliver himself from 
giving them, in Robert Burns's sad phrase, ' a slice of his 
constitution? 

I feel bound to flash a search-light over the Society of 
the period before us. That brings before us humiliating 
revelations in all - unsuspected places. For example, few 
can have been prepared for the revelations of Lieutenant 
Alexander Fergusson's Major Eraser's Manuscript: his 
Adventures in Scotland and England (2 vols., 1889), 
contained in No. II. of Appendix, entitled ' Duncan Forbes 
and Tappit Hens' (pp. 158-169). This consists of a 
wholly holograph letter, fetched from the Pitferrane MSS., 
written by Duncan Forbes to his friend Mr. John Macfarlane, 
W.S., whereon the Editor annotates : ' If it does not show 
the wisdom of the Lord Advocate and Lord President to 
be, at all events proves the truth of the ancient adage, 
poculum mane haustum restaurat naturam, etc' 

This extraordinary letter reports such bestial degradation of 
drinking and other cognate indulgences, together with most 
flagrant mendacity whereby to escape difficulties, as I shrink 
from characterising. I hesitate not to affirm if any letter 
one tithe as low, as vulgar, as vile, had been producible in 
the handwriting of either Robert Fergusson or Robert Burns, 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 109 

their admirers never should have heard the end of it. And 
yet, because the writer was the Honourable Duncan Forbes 
of venerable fame, we are to keep silence ! But I go back 
on this audaciously immoral letter of an ultimately great 
and good man, not to challenge his greatness or goodness, 
but to adduce it as proof positive of the homely description 
of Allan Ramsay somewhat earlier — 

'Aften in Maggie's at hy -jinks 
We guzzled scuds, 
Till we could scarce wC hale-out drinks 
Cast off our duds. ' J 

(' Maggie Johnston.') 

Very significant is honest Allan's ' hale-out drinks,' for it 
means that any glass or tankard had to be drained to the 
last drop. 

Passing from Duncan Forbes and Allan Ramsay's 
1 Maggie Johnston,' other narratives might be given that 
reflect Forbes's letter and Ramsay's racy poem. I state 
without fear of contradiction that, when you get behind the 
lives of the most renowned judges of the Land, and while 
they were daily seated on the bench and in actual cases in 
their maudlin obfuscation were condemning men to be hung 
with obscene jesting — hung for stealing a sheep and less — 
and of divines of the highest positions in the Kirk of 
Scotland, you are startled with such debaucheries, such 
self-indulgences, such hilarious getting drunk as is appalling. 
In relation to the clergy, whoso would know the facts must 
read and re-read the unblushing Autobiography of the Rev. 
Dr. Alexander Carlyle, minister of Inveresk, containing 
Memorials of the Men and Events of his Time (1861), 
and the many anecdotes of the evangelical Dr. Alexander 
Webster, whose current nickname was Magnum Bonum, 
from his enormous drink-swallowing capacity. 

Robert Fergusson had clerical associates, — I dare not call 
them friends, — and if even the Evangelicals thus indulged, 
what may we not conceive of the Moderates ? 

If we pass still further within the circles of society of 
Edinburgh — 1769-17 74 — we discover equally astonishing 
evidences how fast was its social life. I may not draw 
here and now upon my collected materials. I would refer 

1 = undress. 



no FAMOUS SCOTS 

the reader to Guy Manner ing (c. xxxix. n, 'Tappit Hen' 
— convivial habits of the Scottish Bar) and the High-jinks 
therein celebrated ; to the Convivalia of Dr. Robert 
Chambers in his Traditions of Edinburgh and elsewhere ; 
to the letterpress (with all its deficiencies) of John Kay's 
Edinburgh Portraits ; to Walter Geikie's renowned and price- 
less ' Etchings,' and Sir Daniel Wilson's Old Edinburgh. 
These alone will furnish astounding and well-nigh incredible 
exemplifications of the wild licence of conduct and broadness 
of speech of both sexes and of all ranks, and how low the 
examples were of the dwellers in ' ceiled houses ' to the 
masses. 

What I maintain, therefore, is this — that it is uncritical 
and wicked to single out young Robert Fergusson, to 
moralise over him, and fling at him such words as 'dissipation,' 
' indulgence,' ' drunken,' ' vicious,' when, by the necessities 
of circumstance, it was out of his power habitually to live 
the dissipated life mis-ascribed to him, and when the secret 
of any backsliding or over-staying in club or tavern or ale- 
house was due to the impulsion, if I ought not to say 
compulsion, of lawyers and clergy and well-to-do folks, 
ebullient wits and cits and bucks, not at all to his love for 
strong drink qua drink, and never for a day — except in 
sickness — involving neglect of his dreary task-work in the 
Commissary-Depute's office. All this was vigorously phrased 
by Burns, and I give Fergusson the benefit of it — 

1 It's no' I like to sit and swallow, 
But gie me just a true guid fallow, 

Wi' right ingine, 
And spunkie ance to make us mellow, 
And then we'll shine.' 

('To John Kennedy.') 

Fergusson's own protest is thin and weak beside stalwart 
Burns's, but it is on the same lines — 

' He who tastes his grape-juice by stealth, 
Without chosen companions to share, 
Is the basest of slaves to his wealth, 
And the pitiful minion of care.' 

('Damon to his Friends.') 

I demand on behalf of Fergusson that the welcomes ex- 
tended to him were inextricably mixed up with temptation 



ROBERT FERGUSSON in 

to so susceptible and sensitive a being. The usage of the 
period made his invitations out and his evening fellowship 
almost exclusively in the taverns and ale-houses and oyster- 
cellars. It is matter of fact that lawyers adjourned thither 
to be consulted by their clients ; divines ' daundered ' thither 
to converse with their parishioners on ' serious things ' that 
ended in things not serious ; doctors saw their patients in 
public-houses, as testifies Dr. John Armstrong, poet of the 
1 Art of Preserving Health ' ; wages were paid there ; gentle- 
women arranged for ' parties ' in strangest of strange 
1 houffs ' ; and so all round. We are to think of all flock- 
ing thither and as sitting and drinking and jesting till far on 
beyond i the wee short hour ayont the twa/\ } There was 
no Forbes Mackenzie Act then, no limitation of hours, no 
police interference, no grandmotherly legislation. All these 
were in gremio futuri ; * Kilbagie ' was sold at a penny a 
gill ; claret flowed like water ; a beggar could get drunk on 
a groat (if the ale were bad or Johnny Dow's seconds). 
All these things are reflected in the city-poems of Fergusson, 
and hence Angellier has drawn mainly upon them in his 
vivid pictures of every-day and every-night life of Edinburgh ; 
and from them we are compelled to realise that then practi- 
cally there were no public entertainments such as now abound 
— no public lectures — hardly even concerts, merely the stiff 
and starched 'Assembly' that so distressed Oliver Goldsmith, 
presided over by Miss Nicky Murray and her set. There 
was nothing whereby mind was pitted against mind, through 
discussion of some great book or of political, ethical, and 
metaphysical problems. Political freedom — ' free speech ' 
— had not yet been won, and only by a small minority was 
so much as dreamed of. 

It was, therefore, under these heavy conditions that 
Robert Fergusson was plunged — and I re-use the word 
rather than was introduced. I ask if it would not have been 
a moral miracle, an impossible exception, had he not paid 
the penalty of such plunge ; not forgetting that he took it 
with a constitution primarily feeble, and could not but be 
more easily over-set with quantities of claret, whisky, or 
ale that legal and clerical topers would have laughed at. 

I for one, too, can understand the irresistible temptation 
to forget sordid cares and sorrows of circumstance by 



ii2 FAMOUS SCOTS 

spending his evenings that he was invited to spend, in 
clubs, taverns, and ale-houses. He himself has dropped 
significant hints that reveal how he strove against the 
current of city-life. To me the very commonplaceness of 
certain of his English poems, when read between the lines, 
conveys an impression of felt victimisation that is infinitely 
pathetic — nay, tragic. 

Still more pregnantly suggestive is the 'Town and 
Country Contrasted in an epistle to a friend,' of 'rosy 
health,' which the reader will do well to study. In- 
dividual lines and couplets gleam like tears in the very 
poorest verses ; e.g. — 

' Adieu ! ye baneful pleasures of the town ! ' 

'Where Pride and Folly point the slippery way.'* 

(' Retirement.') 

' Alas ! how poor the pleasures these impart ! ' 

('Decay of Friendship.') 

' Fled are the moments of delusive mirth ; 
The fancy 'd pleasure ! paradise divine ! ' 

' What evils have not frenzied mortals done 
By wine, the ignis fatuus of the mind ! ' 

' By Bacchus power, ye sons of riot say, 

How many watchful sentinels have bled, 
How many travellers have lost their way, 

By lamps unguided through the ev'ning shade.' 

How inevitably are we reminded, as we meditate on these 
affecting proofs of the moral conflict in Fergusson's bosom, 
of the profound as tender philosophy of Robert Burns with 
its magnificent burden — 

' What's done we partly may compute, 
But know not what's resisted.' 

I pause here to adopt for Fergusson a still more penetra- 
tive and a remarkably tender and exceptionally generous 
verdict on Burns from Lord Jeffrey. His whole emotion 
and its expression as exacted by a sympathetic study of 
our Poet, applies to him — 

' In the last week I have read all Burns's life and works — not without 
many tears, for the life especially. What touches me most is the 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 113 

pitiable poverty in which that gifted being (and his noble-minded father) 
passed his early days — the painful frugality to which their innocence 
was doomed, and the thought, how small a share of the useless luxuries 
in which we (such comparatively poor creatures) indulge, would have 
sufficed to shed joy and cheerfulness in their dwelling and perhaps to 
have saved that glorious spirit from the trials and temptations under 
which he fell so prematurely. Oh, my dear Empson, there must be 
something terribly wrong in the present arrangements of the Universe 
when these things can happen and be thought natural. I could lie 
down in the dust and cry and grovel there, I think, for a century, to 
save such a soul as Burns from the suffering and the contamination and 
the degradation which the same arrangements imposed upon him ; and 
I fancy that if I could but have known him in my present state of wealth 
and influence, I might have saved and reclaimed and preserved him 
even to the present day. He would not have been so old as my 
brother judge, Lord Glenlee, or Lord Lynedoch, or a dozen others 
that we meet daily in society. And what a creature, not only in genius, 
but in nobleness of character, potentially at least, if right models had 
been put gently before him. But we must not dwell on it. You South 
Saxons cannot value him rightly, and miss half the pathos and more 
than half of the sweetness. There is no such mistake as that your 
chief miss is in the humour or the shrewd sense. It is in far higher 
and more delicate elements — God help you. We shall be up to the 
whole, I trust, in another world' (Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey \ 
i. pp. 451-2 : nth Nov. 1837). 

In the lights and shadows of all this I now proceed to 
demonstrate the necessity of our handling the whole 
problem so as to traverse the miserable gossip-mongering and 
as miserable moralising of Dr. David Irving, that has given 
form and colour to nearly every subsequent biographer, with 
disastrous results. Dealing with his thoughtless rather than 
perhaps malignant misrepresentations, I first present in 
integrity his bitter worst and all, and I shall then place beside 
it the finer and more sane and human accounts of Thomas 
Sommers and others who knew him intimately, since he was 
absolutely and necessarily unknown to Irving. 

I give Dr. Irving the benefit of quoting from his later 
edition of the Life (1804, Lives of Scottish Writers, ii. 409- 
40). I italicise bits that will go far to obviate need of 
commentary or refutation after what I have already said 
and shown, save correction of alleged facts — 

1 The public immediately began to perceive the merit of his produc- 
tions ; and from their first appearance in the Weekly Magazine, he 
was regarded as a poet of no ordinary talents. As the charms of his 
social qualities were even superior to those of his poetry, it is not 

8 



il 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 

surprising that his company was eagerly solicited by people of every 
description. To the circles where gaiety and humour prevailed, his con- 
versation recommended itself by every possible allurement ; and where 
more grave deportment was necessary, he could accommodate his manners 
to those of the individual with whom he was usually associated. Such 
qualities as those, without producing any beneficial effects, tended to 
connect him with unprofitable companions, who gradually conducted 
him through the various stages of rice and dissipation. From the 
caresses of the moment he could derive no solid advantage. Those 
who have spent an ecstatic evening in the company of some man of 
intellectual eminence, are often very indifferent with respect to the 
mode in which he disposes of himself after the hour of separation : the 
object for which they solicited his company being obtained, they seldom 
exert themselves in order to place him in a situation adequate to his 
merit and congenial to his wishes ' (ii. 420-1). 

Further — 

' His latter years were wasted in perpetual dissipation. The condition 
to which he had reduced himself, prepared him for grasping at any object 
which pre temporary alleviation of his cares; and as his funds 

were often in an exhausted state, he at length had recourse to mean 
fonts. Associates possessed of the same taste for letters and of the 
same ruinous habits of intemperance were not wanting. Men of this 
seeming incongruity of character have always abounded in the northern 
as well as in the southern metropolis' {id. pp. 421-2). 

Finally — 

' His surviving relations retain a pleasing remembrance of his dutiful 
behaviour towards his parents : and the tender regard with which his 
memory is still cherished by his numerous acquaintance, fully demon- 
strates his value as a friend. Till his dissipated manner of life had in 
a great measure eradicated all sense of delicacy or propriety, he always 
evinced a manly spirit of independence. Let it be recorded to his 
honour that he never disgraced his Muse with the servile strain of 
panegyric ; that he flattered no illiterate peer, nor sacrificed his sincerity 
in order to advance his interest' {id. p. 430). ! 

Before placing beside this infamously darkened picture — 
spite of its justifiable censure of the heedlessness of many 
who spend 'an ecstatic evening in the company of some 
men of intellectual eminence ' and the modicum of praise 
worked in here and there — Thomas Sommers's absolute 
contradiction of it, I meet the charges italicised with 
irrefragable Facts. 

1 The more creditable that so to do was common enough. Even a 
Bishop (Porteous) dared to write and publish this of George II. : — 

' No farther blessing could on earth be given, 
The next degree of happiness was heaven ! ' 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 115 

The so - called ' unprofitable companions ' and ' evil 
associates ' were men of character. Their names are in- 
troduced into the Poet's ' Last Will ' and its ' Codicil,' and 
unluckily for Irving he specifically refers to these poems 
as containing the names he had in his mind. To brand 
Thomas Sommers, David Herd, Alexander Runciman, 
James Cummyng, William Woods, [Sir] Henry Raeburn, 
George Paton, and the rest within and without the ' Will ' 
and ' Codicil ' as this stripling biographer had the audacity 
to do, was an outrage on all literary decency and amenity, 
and, as we shall learn immediately, the outcome of listening 
to the irresponsible chatter of men who boasted that 
Fergusson held them for friends, though he never knew 
them. 

The phrase ' he at length had recourse to mean expedients ' 
receives its ignominious quietus by giving the actual story, 
whence it was derived, as I personally compelled Dr. Irving 
ruefully to admit when I confronted him with it. Sommers 
tells it— 

' Such were his vocal powers and attachment to Scots songs, that 
in the course of his convivial frolics, he laid a wager with some of his 
associates, that if they would furnish him with a certain number of 
printed ballads (no matter what kind) he would undertake to dispose of 
them as a street-singer, in the course of two hours. The bet was laid, 
and next evening, being in the month of November, a large bundle of 
ballads were procured for him. He wrapped himself in a shabby great- 
coat, put on an old scratch-wig, and in this disguised form, commenced 
his adventure at the Weigh-house, head of the West Bow. In his 
going down the Lawnmarket and High Street, he had the address to 
collect great multitudes around him, while he amused them with a 
variety of favourite Scots songs, by no means such as he had ballads 
for, and gained the wager, by disposing of the whole collection. He 
waited on his companions by eight o'clock that evening, and spent with 
them, in mirthful glee, the produce of his street adventure ' (pp. 27-8). 

This pure frolic and its shared 'produce' your Drs. 
Dryasdust set down as a resort to ' mean expedients ' ! 
Surely comment is not called for? But how light were the 
task, if need were, to parallel this particular escapade ! 

The generalisation of 'perpetual dissipation,' and 'dissi- 
pated manner of life, eradicating all sense of delicacy,' Thomas 
Sommers indignantly deals with. 

It is obligatory that I further preserve another little 
statement by Miss Ruddiman to myself, in reference to Mr. 



n6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Robert's going to Johnny Dow's and Luckie Middlemist's 
and elsewhere oftener than Mr. Ruddiman could approve. 

' His cheek, ' said she, ' I have often heard my brother say, would redden 
through its paleness if but a hint of such meetings were thrown out, and 
on being remonstrated with, with the big tears trickling between his 
fingers as he held them over his face, he would sob, " Oh, sir, anything 
to forget my poor mother and these aching fingers!"' ( Works, 1851, 
p. lxxxiii). 

Solomon of old knew all about this ' forgetting.' Has he 
not counselled, ' Let him drink, and forget his poverty and 
remember his misery no more'? (Proverbs xxxi. 7). Has 
he not also luridly yet half-pitifully described the entice- 
ment, the fiao-Kavia, nay, ' the pleasures of sin ' that tepid- 
blooded Pharisees know nothing of (professedly), but which 
others more human do understand, and understand how 
over and over men of the make of Robert Fergusson 'and 
John Keats indulge or if you will sin, not because they 
desire to sin but to suck the pleasure. How moralists ignore 
this ! Robert Burns must again speak here — 

1 O ye douce folk, that live by rule, 
Grave, tideless-blooded, calm and cool, 
Compar'd wi' you— O fool ! fool ! fool ! 

How much unlike ! 
Your hearts are just a standing pool, 
Your lives a dyke.' 

('To James Smith.') 

Now for Sommers's incisive if homely criticism of Dr. 
David Irving — again italicising bits that will reward pon- 
dering — 

'To the Reader, — Notwithstanding various accounts have already 
been published of the life of Robert Fergusson, I flatter myself, that I need 
scarcely apologise for having added one more to the number ; seeing 
I have been enabled to trace the history of that Poet from the intimate 
acquaintance which for a series of years subsisted between us. In the 
course of that acquaintance, I must have enjoyed many opportunities of 
acquiring more certain knowledge of his real character, than those 
biographers who knew him not, and who had taken their materials 
from others little better informed than themselves. ... As I have ob- 
served, his short-lived existence has been recorded by several writers 
[Irving, Alexander Campbell, Bishop Gleig], but I am sorry to say, 
that they seem to have been more anxious to display their own abilities 
as to grammatical precision and pomtous description, than studious of 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 117 

simplicity of style AND truth in the narrative. . . . With the best good- 
nature, with much modesty, and the greatest goodness of heart, he was 
always sprightly, always entertaining 1 (pp. iii-vi). 

More trenchantly on the Life itself — 

1 The last edition [of his Poems] printed in Scotland, was at Glasgow 
in the year 1800, to which also is prefixed a Life of the Poet, differing 
materially from every former : the writer of which, however, sets out 
with observing — " It is to be wished, that the life of this unfortunate Poet 
had been delineated by someone possessed of more ample information 
than the present writer [Dr. David Irving], with all his endeavours, has 
been able to procure." This observation is perhaps just ; but had he been 
better acquainted with the life and genuine character of the young bard, 
a variety of reflections which he has thought proper to make, would not 
have been found in his narrative.* 

Finally, and drastically, and as by a ricochet returning 
Irving's evil words on his own head, we have this attest- 
ation — 

1 In this account of the life of Robert Fergusson, I can assure the 
reader that although it is nearly at the distance of twenty-nine years 
since he died, the various and singular circumstances which marked 
his history, and of which I have taken notice, are at present almost as 
fresh in my remembrance as when they occurred. I passed many 
happy hours with him, not in dissipation and folly, but in useful 
conversation and in listening to the more inviting and rational displays 
of his wit, sentiment, and story ; in the exercise of which he never 
failed to please, instruct, and charm. Here I cannot help taking notice 
of an assertion which appears in the Life accompanying the Glasgow 
edition of his works: "that he associated with men of very dissolute 
manners, several of whom are mentioned in his ' Last Will ' and the 
' Codicil ' to it." As I showed before, that the author of that Life has 
been egregiously wrong in many particulars, so in this likewise he is 
equally erroneous. I knew those persons well ; they were indeed 
men of a social cast, but not of that debauched turn which the term 
dissolute bears. They are all sleeping in the dust ! Seven of them were 
men of literary taste, engaged in business, and married. At the period 
of the Poet's death, all were more than double his age, one only 
excepted' (pp. 45-47)- 1 

The several accounts of Sommers, Campbell, and Stuart 
hold in them the gist of the whole problem, and pity, 
sympathy, unbidden tears, not flatulent moralising, go 

1 The reader will find Sommers verified by Alexander Campbell 
(Introduction, 1798), by Peter Stuart, editor of the Star, in his striking 
letter to Burns (Burns's Correspondence) — the latter recalling the 
Poet's 'richness of conversation ' and 'felicitous manner ' delightedly. 
Our limits forbid more than these references. 



n8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

forth toward the child of genius, and hot wrath that none 
of those who extracted and exacted from him his ' company ' 
and applauded the coruscation of his rare conversational 
powers (by universal testimony), and were thrilled by 
his exquisite singing of 'Auld Scotia's sangs,' was found 
to befriend him, or to guide and strengthen a naturally 
weak will and sway a naturally impulsive if not tempestu- 
ous temperament. I not only catch up Robert Burns's 
malediction — 

' My curse upon your whinstane hearts, 
Ye Embrugh gentry,' 

but think with heart-breaking compassion of what Robert 
Fergusson might have been made had he been fortunate 
enough to secure such a post as Willie Laidlaw's with Sir 
Walter, or Allan Cunningham's with Sir Francis Chantrey, 
and I the more poignantly think of this from an actual 
occurrence and opportunity that must now be told. Follow- 
ing on or accompanying the little volume of 1773, Fergusson 
published separately, without passing it through the Weekly 
Magazine, his longest poem, 'Auld Reekie.' It had'' pre- 
fixed to it this modest little dedication : ' To Sir William 
Forbes, Bart., this poem is most respectfully dedicated by 
his most obedient and very humble servant the Author.' 

Forbes has been pseudo-canonised by no less than Sir 
Walter in Marmion, and Dr. Chambers has told pleasantly 
the story of his great ' Banking House' (i860), but posterity 
has not cared to remember the pompous, egotistical aristocrat, 
rather has accepted John Foster's vivisection of him in 
that tremendous Eclectic Review paper of his on his Life 
of Beattie. I cannot help myself in thinking contemptu- 
ously of this purse-proud and toadied man of wealth. He did 
some small service for old Alexander Ross, and he surprised 
me by admiring Beattie's guiltily scanty vernacular verse ; 
but though he must have seen Fergusson's poems as they 
appeared in the Weekly Magazine and the volume of 1773 
and this poem of 'Auld Reekie,' it is deplorable that he 
was too haughty to acknowledge a ' Poor Relation ' (through 
his mother, Elizabeth Forbes), and took no notice of 

'The poor ovation of a minstrel's praise,' 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 119 

with the result that, unencouraged by his one sought-for 
patron, the design of ' Auld Reekie ' was left uncompleted, 
and Canto 1st only slightly supplemented and corrected as 
it appeared in 1779. It is noticeable that copies of 'Auld 
Reekie' — including that in the British Museum (11632 
c. 23, — exist, that lack the dedication, suggesting that the 
aggrieved Poet had cancelled it in remaining copies. 

Our statement and exposure of Edinburgh social life, and 
authcritative refutation of Dr. David Irving's mendacities of 
caugfr.-up rumour, have, I hope, justified my attitude toward 
Robef. Fergusson. 

I an. making no speech for the defence (in legal phrase- 
ology) I am simply affirming psychological facts, and 
demanding that in any estimate or judgment the differentia- 
tion of physical and mental character be weighed in order 
to mngate prejudice and severity and get at the truth. 
Moreover, the same problems are presented as in Fergusson, 
in Villon, Gautier, De Musset, and in our own Richard 
Savage, Thomas Chatterton, and shipwrecked Clarence 
Mangan, of whom Imogen Guiney warbles so exquisitely. 

I cose this chapter by emphasising points in our disproof. 
I affirm and write large that there was no ' habitual dissipa- 
tion.' Two things stamp this charge out — the bed-rock 
fact of his continued employment in the Commissary-Depute's 
office to the end, i.e. till the tragedy came, and the very 
small cost of his ale and the like at his ' houffs.' There 
was nothing in the life of Robert Fergusson to warrant the 
hideous and unhappy words of Stevenson (even though 
appropriated by himself) of ' drunken ' and ' vicious.' With 
reference to the latter, and Irving's representation that his 
associates led him down ' through all the stages of vice,' 
there is not one jot or tittle of evidence. In a time of 
licence and fast living no so-called love-liaisons ever came 
up against him, no ' woman's skaith ' was ever laid at his 
door, no such salutations with defiance, of illegitimate 
offspring, as we mourn over in the greater Robert, no single 
polluting or profane line in all his verse, no dram-drinking 
during the day or office-hours, no drinking for the sake of 
the drink, no wasteful expenditure or allowing others to pay 
1 the bill,' no getting into debt. 

It was therefore no degrading thraldom to ' strong drink,' 



120 FAMOUS SCOTS 

no giving way to base-gendered thirst, no helpless surrender 
to evil habit, no unregulated 'dissipation,' no consorting 
with 'dissolute' characters, but the attraction of kindred 
spirits and hearts, that drew Robert Fergusson to :hese 
foregatherings. And I must cry aloud that it was to these 
identical ' houffs ' went the then elite of Edinburgh society, 
men who were born gentlemen and women who were ' fair 
ladies,' and none of them without a soul of goodness ; .n all 
their evil and perchance broadness of speech. It is amply 
a falsehood that Robert Fergusson 'in a large measure 
neglected his profession ' — Irving's slander. So far as he 
went wrong he was far more sinned against than anning, 
was the victim, almost martyr of the Society of the period, 
and if I may not say with Goldsmith that all his failings 
leaned to Virtue's side J and much less appropriate Burns's 
strangely misunderstood words — 

' The light that led astray 
Was light from Heaven,' 

I yet find in native-born temperament and lifelong enriron- 
ment a solution of the problem that fills my mouth not 
with accusing or moralising platitudes, but dims my eyes 
with a mist of tears — 

' If he had lived, you say. — 
Well, well, — if he had lived, what then ? 
Some men 

Will always argue, — yes, I know ... of course 
The argument has force. 
If he had lived, he might have changed. — 
From bad to worse? 
Nay, my shrewd balance-setter, 
Why not from good to better? 
Why not to best? to joy, 
And splendour? oh, my boy!' 

T. E. Brown ('Old John, and other 
Poems: Aber Stations.') 



CHAPTER X 

'BEGINNING OF THE END' — AND END 

'What fair is wrought 
Falls in the prime and passeth like a thought.' 

Drummond of Hawthornden. 

' What ? Has Death come already ? So soon ! Impossible ! . . . 
I have really not had time to do anything ! I was just going to 
undertake.' Ivan Tourgieneff. 

'My lodging is on the cold, cold ground.' — Lee. 

There are anecdotes of Fergusson belonging to 1772-3 
and 1774 that bring him before us in all the fun-loving and 
frolicsome humour of St. Andrews and of the street ballad- 
singing escapade. I cannot tarry to tell them in full, but 
may summarise. His landlord was crapulous, but never- 
theless an unfailing observer of family worship, even when in 
a state most unfit. Our Poet to cure him, or at least in the 
hope of temporarily frightening him into sobriety, contrived 
to secrete himself in a neighbouring closet. As soon as the 
landlord began in loud tones a fervent prayer, there came 
from him a sepulchral rebuke for so daring to profane 
prayer by offering it in the condition in which he was. The 
effect was overwhelming, but — passed away. Another time 
Fergusson contrived to snatch from him a bundle of goods 
that he was stumblingly carrying to a customer, when as 
usual in a maudlin state of intoxication, and had them 
replaced in the shop with a letter from a notorious house 
warning him not to repeat such an outrage as to come to 
her rooms and insult her as he had done. The effect once 
more was overwhelming in the mingled shame and contrition 
and protests against the charge ; but like the other it soon 

passed away. A third anecdote is that our Poet, dressed 

121 



122 FAMOUS SCOTS 

and disguised as a sailor, threw himself into the company of 
certain sailor-acquaintances, and startled them by revelations 
of matters in their lives which they could not imagine any 
stranger knowing. When he had gained his end, he 
removed the disguises and stood forth in his own proper 
person, and a glorious night was spent. 

All these perfectly innocent contrivances your sancti- 
monious, your ' unco guid ' have distorted. They simply 
suggest abundant animal spirits, the boy's heart, the 
irrepressible humorist. A fourth anecdote, which represents 
Fergusson as scribbling a mocking epigram, and flinging it 
by a window into a Glassite chapel, I agree with Hugh 
Miller was done not by the Poet but by one who claimed to 
be an associate {Recollections of Fergusson). 

These gleams of brightness were destined to be all too 
soon quenched. The stage darkens for a tragedy. I must 
now go forward to the final catastrophe — a catastrophe 
that makes the death of Robert Fergusson second only, if 
second, to that of his still younger contemporary, Thomas 
Chatterton, as benignantly told by Sir Daniel Wilson and 
Professor David Masson. 

Early in 1774 he was laid aside by some perilous 
attack. In the Caledonian Mercury of February 1774, 
there was a kindly notice of him — 

' The admirers of Mr. Robert Fergusson, the celebrated poet, will be 
sorry to learn that he has had a very dangerous sickness.' 

But very soon after, the Weekly Magazine had a verse- 
welcome wherein the joy of his admirers is proclaimed on 
again seeing ' part of themselves restored.' Alas ! the restora- 
tion was only temporary. For again, in the Caledonian 
Mercury of 28th July 1774, I found this paragraph — 

' Many lovers of poetry will feel regret to know that Mr. Robert 
Fergusson, the author of some of the most natural and humorous poems 
that have appeared of late years, has been seized with a very dangerous 
illness.' 

Tidings of this had earlier gone to the Cape Club, and it 
is no common pleasure to me to reproduce here from my 
recovered entries in the Cape Club MSS. the following 
extremely creditable notice and resolution — 

'At the Eighteenth Grand Festival, 2nd July 1774. In James 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 123 

Mann's in Craig's Close on Saturday. It was agreed unanimously by 
the Grand Cape that the remainder of the Fines of the Absentees from 
the Meeting after paying what Extraordinary charges may attend the 
Game, shall be applied for the benefit and assistance of a young gentle- 
man a member of the Cape, who has been a considerable time past in 
distress, and the gentlemen present in the Grand Cape made a contribu- 
tion themselves for the same purpose.' 

Then onward we read — 

' Sept. 3rd, 1774. The Recorder intimated that the reason for the 
absence of the member Sir Precentor [Fergusson's title] was that he 
had been very ill.' * 

Throughout, there were fluctuations in his illnesses, and it 
is not to be wondered at that the weakened bodily frame 
reacted on the mental. And yet the Scots poems up to the 
last show no loss of vigour, no decay of racy speech, no 
failure of inspiration. 1772 is marked as his advent, but 
1773 if not 1774 brought advances on 'The Daft Days/ 
' Elegy on the Death of Scots Music,' and the others. 
Nevertheless, there are measurelessly pathetic records that 
make it certain that, early in 1774 — and noticeably his ' Last 
Will ' and its ' Codicil,' which appeared in November and 
December of 1773, were his last known compositions — the 
' sweet bells ' were ' jangled out of tune and harsh.' 
Anecdotes in tragic proof have been put into print — the 
sorrowfullest of all, surely unthinkingly, by Professor 
William Tennant — bewraying undoubted mental ' imbecility ' 
though still possessed of sound common sense otherwise. 
I have not the heart to re-tell them. Their telling gives me 
the same shudder and loathing that I experienced when I 
first read Trelawney's infamous desecration in lifting the 
coffin-shroud of dead Byron, and his account of what he 
saw of that ' deformity ' that so tortured that proud soul. I 
simply state the fact. The shadows deepened, broadened, 
and blackened. The hitherto alert brain grew confused. 
Among the first results of a little lightening of the cloud, he 
collected every scrap of his manuscripts — poetical and all — 
and indiscriminately committed them to the flames. He was 
overheard to say, 'There is one thing I am glad of; I have 
never written a line against religion.' Let that be held in 

1 I regret that a number of fresh entries from the Cape Club MSS. 
are crushed out. 



i2 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 

recollection. Robert Fergusson did not fall in with the mode 
led by contemporary David Hume of mocking at all serious- 
ness, nor did he so much as once write lines he would have 
wished to blot. Had there been the ' dissoluteness ' so 
cruelly and falsely charged, it must have come out. It 
never did. 

He appeared in the streets in the summer once or twice. 
Once or twice, too, he called on the Ruddimans ; but, 
though there were gleams of his old brightness of look and 
speech, he was on the whole sad and grave. Speedily the 
gleam was swallowed up of darkness : for it was during the 
later months that the incidents indicated took place. But 
at this point it is necessary to correct a statement, and an 
inference from it, of an occurrence that Thomas Sommers 
expressly affirms, from personal knowledge and intercourse 
with Fergusson immediately preceding and succeeding 
the alleged meeting, took place two years before. It 
is that, on a casual visit to Haddington churchyard, he 
was met by the Rev. John Brown — clarum et venerabile 
nomen — and was so solemnly and awfully spoken to by him 
on ' death and eternity ' as to have been driven to despair. 

Accrediting this, R. L. Stevenson, it will be remembered, 
ascribes Fergusson's madness to having been c pestered ' 
with a ' damnatory creed ' — an utter delusion. It is all a 
— fiction. The character of John Brown of Haddington 
gives assurance that anything he might say would be wise, fit- 
ting, and kindly. At anyrate, it made no such evil impression 
on Fergusson. He returned as he went from Haddington 
his own bright self — doubtless remembering, but not to distress 
him, paternal counsels of an under-shepherd ever faithfully on 
the watch to ' speak a word in season.' I repeat and accentu- 
ate, this interview was in 1772 — not 1774. I would also 
state that John Brown of Haddington, so far from having 
been a grim, uncompromisingly orthodox Calvinist, was 
large-hearted, and relished exchange of pleasantry by his 
own friends and in intercourse with his fellow-men, and 
not less his Horace. 

Whilst thus in July sequestered, a gloom as of the cave 
of Despair fell upon him. The Bible — his mother's gift- 
Bible when he went off to the Grammar School of Dundee — 
became his sole companion from morning to noon, and 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 125 

from noon to night. His posthumous paraphrase on Job 
chap, iii., that contains the couplet which so spoke home — as 
we saw — to dying Robert Burns — 

' Say, wherefore has an over-bounteous Heaven 
Light to the comfortless and wretched given ? ' 

and his similarly posthumous odes to ' Horror ' and to 
' Disappointment,' reveal to us the thoughts that haunted 
him. In these, John Martin like, we are shown the lurid 
sky that bent over him, by lightning rather than light. 

The final act of the tragedy was heralded by one of those 
casual things that so frequently hold in them disproportionate 
potency. While keeping within doors he had, in the room 
adjoining that in which he slept, a favourite starling. It 
had been a gift from a very dear friend in the country. 
One night a cat having found its way down the chimney 
(so it was reported) seized the poor bird. Its piteous cries 
awoke Fergusson. He rose hurriedly, and discovered the 
cause of the alarm, but too late to save his songster-pet. 

This occurrence was a double seizure. It literally ' seized ' 
his imagination. Sleep was banished for the rest of the 
night. Words in St. Luke xii. 39 sprang upon his retentive 
memory — ' I will come on thee as a thief and thou shall not 
know what hour I will come upon thee.' He reasoned as he 
brooded over the sudden destruction of his victim-starling — 
how sudden and how fatal had been the stroke to a ' sinless 
and unaccountable creature.' ' And he ' — ' what if Death 
should come thus suddenly on him, to whom such an event 
was not to obtain oblivion but the passage to a state of ever- 
lasting misery or happiness ? ' Giving way to such thoughts 
that doubtless were started the more readily amidst the 
stillness of the night after the pitiful screams of the perishing 
bird, the morning found him ' ivrought up to a pitch of remorse 
bordering on despair' He rose, resolved no more to mix 
with the ' social and the gay ' — ghastly to him now — but to 
be a recluse, devoured by reflections on ' past follies ' and — 
as he moaned, ' an aimless, irresolute, misspent life ' — broken 
words surely not to be pressed against him! All his 
natural vivacity forsook him. Those lips that had never 
opened but to charm were now shut as by an unseen Gorgon. 
With a peculiar, wild, entreating, accusing look, he refused 



126 FAMOUS SCOTS 

all invitations out. Religion was now his only theme, and, 
as we have before stated, his mother's gift-Bible his constant 
companion. And so with only brief intervals of respite — 
respite that meant only postponement, not deliverance — the 
cloud broadened and lowered with no crimson fire within 
it. Emphatically he was ' walking in darkness and seeing no 
light: 

' His life was cold, and dark, and dreary, 
It rained, and the wind was never weary ; 
His thoughts still clung to the mouldering Past, 
But the hopes of youth fell thick on the blast, 
And the days were dark and dreary.' 

Thus passed the long days and nights of, I fear, most of 
1 774; and it is mournful to think that one so dowered, so right- 
hearted, so gentle, so modest, so loveable, so (I reiterate) 
sinned against rather than sinning in his fitful compliances 
with the exactions of Society, should thus have been robbed 
of the brilliant hopes that had shed their radiance over 
him on his advent as a vernacular poet when he sang so 
unforgettably — 

' Like thee, by Fancy wing'd, the Muse 
Scuds ear' an' heartsome ower the dews, 
Fu' vogie, an' fu' blythe to crap 
The winsome flow'rs frae Nature's lap ; 
Twining her living garlands there, 
That lyart Time can ne'er impair.' 

('Ode to the Bee.') 

Yes : and others had shared these hopes — 

' There were 
Who form'd high hopes, and flattering ones, of thee, 
Young Robert ! For thine eye was quick to speak 
Each opening feeling : should they not have known 
If the rich rainbow on the morning cloud 
Reflects its radiant dyes, the husbandman 
Beholds the ominous glory, and foresees 
Impending storm?' 

Even after the sorrowful season that I have had to 
describe, he must have visited some friends; for the final 
blow fell when he was absent from his own room. Thomas 
Sommers tells us that, about two months before his death, 
he was spending an evening with a few friends when, in 
preparing to return home, his feet caught in a stair-carpet 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 127 

knob and he was precipitated to the bottom along steep 
narrow steps. He must have been frightfully hurt about 
the head, for he bled profusely. When borne home to his 
mother's house he could give no account of what had 
happened, being unconscious — much as later (1794) James 
Bruce of Kinnaird was destined to be on a similar stumbling 
accident — through concussion and, it is suspected, lesion 
of the brain. 

Toward morning, consciousness revived, but with it his 
former illusions. He would yet be heard of as a great 
preacher of the glorious gospel of the blessed God. 
Ultimately, he grew extremely violent — ' furious ' is 
Sommers's term — so much so that poor, thin creature 
though he was, it took three strong persons to control 
him — his violence and seeming strength in pitiful contrast 
with his actual weakness from loss of blood. Broken 
fragments of his speech are heart-breaking to think of. 

His mother being still left to moil and toil by her cold- 
hearted and miserly brother — that ' uncle ' whose name 
must for ever stink in the annals of Scottish literature — had 
no means or place whereby to see to her darling son's 
welfare. She had to earn her daily bread. She had to 
wait on her lodgers in her spared rather than really spare 
room. And so there was nothing for it but removal to the 
one wretched Asylum for the insane then in Edinburgh. 

As too often has been done — but perhaps excusably — 
a ruse had to be resorted to to get him quietly to the place, 
at the West Bow, Bristo Port — the house being called 
the Schelles (or Cells) ; which seems to have been a kind 
of appanage to the old Darien House, and which itself had 
been degraded into the Workhouse for paupers. 

' On pretence of taking him in the evening to visit a friend, he 
was put into a sedan chair,' and carried to the place (described con- 
temporarily as ' a gloomy sequestered mansion ' ). When the sedan 
chair was set down in the narrow lobby, Fergusson instantly detected 
the decoy and fraud — showing restored sanity — and gave a great cry. 
Thomas Sommers states that it was ' answered by shrieks from other 
wretched captives in the house.' (Sime and T. G. Stevenson's 'Views 
of Old Edinburgh ' preserve for us ' The Cells,' south-east corner of the 
Darien House grounds.) 

The fact of his instantaneous recognition of his en- 
trapping goes to our hearts to-day. During the first night 



128 FAMOUS SCOTS 

of his confinement, he slept none. When, in the morning, 
the keeper visited him, he found him ' walking along the 
stone floor of his cell, with his arms folded and in sullen 
sadness uttering not a word.' 

1 After some minutes, he clapped his right hand on his forehead and 
complained much of pain.' He asked the keeper 'who brought him 
there?' Being answered 'friends,' he replied, 'Yes, friends indeed! 
they think I am too wicked to live, but you will see me "a burning 
and a shining light."' 'You have been so already,' answered the 
kindly keeper. 'You mistake me,' said Fergusson. 'I mean you 
shall see me and hear of me as a bright minister of the gospel. ' ' I 
shall be happy to see that day indeed,' again replied Forrest, the 
keeper. 

I care not to prolong the narrative. Thomas Sommers 
gives an account of a visit of himself and a famous medical 
man of the day, Dr. John Aitken, whereon the latter was 
hopeful of a complete and perfect recovery. Certainly the 
conversations reported during more than an hour indicated 
perfect sanity. And yet — and yet the terrible ' jangle ' of 
the ' sweet bells ' of reason was there. For on one occasion 
when he had been reading, a cloud overshadowing the 
moon, he demanded that Jupiter should ' snuff the moon,' 
as though it had been some vast candle. On another 
occasion, having plaited a crown very neatly from the 
straws of his cell, he proclaimed himself a — king. 1 But now 
he was calm and composed. I let his simple-hearted early 
biographer and friend speak for me : — 

' We got immediate access to the cell, and found Robert lying with 
his clothes on, stretched upon a bed of loose uncovered straw. The 
moment he heard my voice, he instantly arose — got me in his arms 
and wept. The doctor felt his pulse and declared it to be favourable. 
I asked the keeper (whom I formerly knew as a gardener) to allow 
him to accompany us into an adjoining back court, by way of taking 
the air. He consented. Robert told hold of me by the arm, placing 
me on his right and the doctor on his left, and in this form we walked 
backward and forward along the court, conversing for nearly an hour ; 
in the course of which many questions were asked at him both by the 
doctor and myself, to which he returned most satisfactory answers, and 
seemed very anxious to obtain his liberty. The sky was lowering, the 
sun being much obscured. Led by curiosity and knowing his natural 

1 Possibly the Poet — who knew the dramatists well — had heard Nat 
Lee's song ' With a garland of straw will I crown thee my love ' (Mr. 
W. Keith- Leask). 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 129 

quickness, I asked him what hour of the day it might be ? He stopped, 
and looking up, with his face towards the south, while his hands were 
clasped, paused a little, and said it was within five minutes of twelve. 
The doctor looked his watch, and exclaimed, "It is just six minutes 
to twelve.'" 

Other details follow, which may be omitted. Sommers 
then proceeds — 

1 Having passed about two hours with him on this visit, we found 
it necessary to take our leave, the doctor assuring him that he would 
soon be restored to his friends, and that I would visit him again in a 
day or two. He calmly and without a murmur walked with us to the 
cell, and upon parting, he reminded the doctor [of his promise] to get 
him soon at liberty, and of mine to see him next day ' (pp. 33-36). 

The promised second visit of Sommers was prevented by 
pressure of business, and he did not see the Poet again. 
But a still more sadly interesting and pathetic thing has 
been recorded, viz. that he would sing the ' Birks of In- 
vermay' and other Scottish melodies with a pathos and 
sweetness never surpassed in his days of full health. But 
these and other like incidents were but as 

' Moonlight on a troubled sea, 
Brightening the storm it cannot calm.' 

It is due to Sommers, to Dr. Aitken, the Ruddimans, 
and others from the Cape Club, to keep in recollection that 
Fergusson was not, as some of his moralising biographers 
have asserted, ' forsaken of all his friends] and left un- 
visited. Especially — and with this I shall close our (to me) 
heart-trying story — it is to be made known that his last 
visitors were his good mother and sister Margaret (Mrs. 
Duval). Campbell and Sommers have preserved particulars 
that few I should think can read with unwet eyes. The 
evening was chilly and damp. It was October. His 
feet, he said, felt very cold, and he asked his mother to 
gather up the (poor) bedclothes and sit upon them. She 
did so. He looked wistfully at his mother, and said, 
c Oh, mother, this is kind indeed,' but again complained 
that his feet were ' cold, cold.' Turning to his sister, he 
asked — 

1 Might you not frequently come and sit by me thus — you cannot 
imagine how comfortable it would be — you might fetch your seam and 
sew beside me.' An interval of silence was filled up with sobs and 

9 



i 3 o FAMOUS SCOTS 

tears. ' What ails ye ? Wherefore sorrow for me ? ' he said. ' I am 
very well cared for here — I do assure you I want for nothing, but it 
is cold — it is very cold. ' Again he said, ' You know I told you it 
would come to this at last : yes, I told you. ' The keeper gave a 
signal for retirement, and his mother and sister rising, he cried, ' Oh, 
do not go yet, mother ! I hope to be soon — Oh, do not go yet — do 
not leave me.' 

But the allotted time was up, and they had to pass out. 
They parted ; and in the silence and darkness of that 
same night, alone with The Alone, he died. This event 
took place on 16th October 1774, when he had only a 
few weeks completed his twenty-fourth year. 

The poor wasted and worn body was placed in a suit- 
able coffin, and a ' large company,' Thomas Sommers 
informs us, gathered at the West Bow and laid what was 
mortal of him in the churchyard of the Canongate, from 
whose burial-register I give this entry — 

'1774. October 19. Robert Fergusson, Writer in Edinburgh: 
outside of Hay's burying-place. 24 years.' 

This reveals that he was interred in the same grave with 
his father. 

A twofold sequel adds to the unutterable sorrowfulness 
of this so utterly unlooked-for end of the young life. The 
first is that his mother, just after seeing him (as described), 
received a letter from her sailor -son 'Hary,' from the 
United States, enclosing a sum of money whereby she 
would have been enabled to bring her ' laddie ' back again 
to their 'ain hame.' Then, almost immediately on the 
back of this, a letter for the dead young Poet reached, 
enclosing a draft for fully ^100, with an urgent invitation 
that he — Fergusson — would join the sender in India, when 
his future would be secure. To the undying honour of 
that sender, I rejoice to be able to add, that when informed 
of his friend's recent death and the whole circumstances, 
he insisted on Mrs. Fergusson's keeping every penny of the 
draft. Miss Ruddiman remembered her tears of gratitude 
as she told their family of this additional generosity. 

Hitherto this beautiful incident has only been known 
as having been done by a 'Mr. Burnett.' Irving and 
the rest who tell it never seem to have so much as tried 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 131 

to get at more than the name. Thanks to the sympathetic 
seconding of my searches and researches by several helpers, 
I have recovered interesting data, whereby I can ask, even 
at this late day, that honour may be done to the ' Great 
Heart ' type of Scot — all the more that though he survived 
Fergusson until 1826, he never sought to proclaim on the 
* house-top ' what he had purposed and planned, and 
generously proceeded to do. His one lifelong regret was 
that his intended help came ' too late.' 

The ' Mr. Burnett ' was John Burnett, Esq., of Elrick, 
Aberdeenshire. He was fourth son of John Burnett of 
Elrick, merchant in Aberdeen — bailie in 1762 ; later, Dean 
of Guild — and Margaret Strachan his wife. He was 
baptized on 28th July 1745 (being about five years older, 
therefore, than Fergusson), and was taught book-keeping 
and arithmetic by A. Sinclair, Aberdeen. In 1762 he 
petitioned for a writership in the East India Company's 
service. His application was granted, and he was ap- 
pointed to Fort Marlborough (in Sumatra), where he 
arrived in 1763, when Fergusson was at the Grammar 
School, Dundee. The lists of the Company's servants at 
this time are few and brief. In one published in 1768, 
John Burnett's name appears as ' factor ' on the Fort 
Marlborough establishment, and assistant at Nattal (on 
the west coast of Sumatra). By 1771 he had reached 
the grade of Senior Merchant, still retaining his post at 
Nattal, which, however, he had relinquished by 1778. 
The list of 1780 shows him 'at home.' From the Court 
minutes it appears that he postponed his return to his 
official duties from time to time on the plea of ill-health, 
until in October 1784 he was ordered either to proceed 
to his post or resign. No further particulars have been 
traced in the books of the Company. So far the public 
books of the great Company, but on further examination, 
at the request for me of Lord Aldenham, it was found 
not only that John Burnett had been transferred to Ben- 
coolen (in Sumatra), but the entry of the actual sending 
of the draft was come upon. I reproduce literatim this 
most satisfying ' find ' : 1 — 

1 I have also cordially to acknowledge the persistent painstaking of 
the custodiers of these old ' Company ' records. 



i 3 2 FAMOUS SCOTS 

' Extract from the General Cash Journal of the United 
Company of Merchants of England trading to the 
East Indies. 

July 1774 London 

By Factory at Bencoolen to Cash 

paid Bills of Exchange drawn from thence, viz. 
Date of Bill 
date Colin Donaldson 18th Sepr. 1772 Dolls. 378 : - 50 @ 5s. /6d. 

Paid in there by 

John Burnett ^103 : 19. 8. Placed July 1774, assigned 16th 
October 1774.' 

I am informed that this was the then roundabout mode 
of transmitting money — getting hold of bills as near the 
amount desired as possible — and that the odd ^3, 19s. 8d. 
was an intentional over-amount in order that the complete 
;£ioo might reach Fergusson. 

I regret that after continuous and laborious local in- 
quiries, I have failed to get at the link that unites John 
Burnett of Elrick with Fergusson. But it seems pretty 
certain that his father was the Aberdeen ' merchant ' with 
whom the Poet's father ' served,' and that it was in 
remembrance of 'the house of Saul' that this kindness 
was shown to the son, albeit it would also seem that 
John Burnett in far-off Sumatra must have got Ruddiman's 
Weekly Magazine, and leapt to the advent of the new 
poet from ' The Daft Days ' onward. Biographers have 
said Burnett was a schoolfellow, but I have come on 
no verification of this. 

Supplementary to this fine record is a hitherto unknown 
fact, viz. that not long subsequent to her son's death, Mrs. 
Fergusson re-married comfortably — as before her, Allan 
Ramsay's mother had done. I have not been successful 
in tracing the date of her second marriage ; but in the 
Canongate Church Register of her burial this is the 
unmistakable entry, now like so many other things for 
the first time recorded — 

' 1782. April 19. Elizabeth Forbes, relict of Alexander Davidson, 
bookseller in Edinburgh, opposite James Smith's burying-place. Aged 
80 years.' 

There is no doubt of this ' Elizabeth Forbes ' having been 
our Poet's mother ; for, as our also first-time printed burial- 
entry of his father shows, this is one of three Fergusson 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 133 

entries in the one Register ; albeit the age eighty must be a 
clerical error, as she was certainly born on 6th March 17 i4,in 
the other. In 1774, when Fergusson died, she was thus in 
her sixtieth year — a noticeable fact, and evidence that the 
1 douce ' burgess of Edinburgh, Alexander Davidson, book- 
seller, knew her worth, and married her for love, not ' siller.' 
What a contrast between the two ages ! — 175 0-1774! 1 7 14- 
1782 ! More amazing still, Robert Fergusson cut off in the 
hey-day of his youth and hope — ' Jamie Duff,' the idiot of 
whom he sang, left to drag out his blank existence until 1789 
— he having been contemporary with all the three — Allan 
Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and Robert Burns ! 

Of Fergusson's personal appearance Sommers has left the 
following account — 

' He was about five feet six inches high, and well shaped. His 
complexion fair, but rather pale. His eyes full, black, and piercing. 
His nose long, his lips thin, his teeth well set and white. His neck 
long and well proportioned. His shoulders narrow, and his limbs long, 
but more sinewy than fleshy. His voice strong, clear, and melodious. 
Remarkably fond of old Scots songs, and the best singer of the "Birks 
of Invermay " I ever heard. When speaking, he was quick, forcible, and 
complaisant. In walking he appeared smart, erect, and unaffected ' 
(p. 45). 'His countenance,' says another (Chambers, as before, who 
himself did not of course personally know him as Sommers did), ' was 
somewhat effeminate [he means ' feminine '], but redeemed by the 
animation imparted to it by his large black eyes. Mingled with the 
penetrative glance of an acute and active mind, was that modesty 
which gives to superior intellect its greatest charm.' 

With reference to the twice-repeated notice of his ' black ' 
eyes Miss Ruddiman told me that they were rather blue- 
black, and I never understood what she meant until I 
chanced upon Fiona Macleod's portraiture of Marcus Mac 
Codrum (Gilanmor) of Uist, 'tall, broad-shouldered, with 
yellow hair, and strangely dark blue-black eyes ' ( The Dan- 
Nan-Ron, p. 160): (2) Eilidh Mclian tie Birdeen, ''her 
changing hazel eyes, now grey-green, now dusked with sea- 
gloom . . . her wonderful arched eyebrows dark so that they 
see?ned black ' ( Tie Birdeen, p. 2 7 7 ). The portrait by Alexander 
Runciman now as a ' loan ' in the National Portrait Gallery of 
Scotland, Edinburgh, from the Misses Raeburn — inherited 
from Fergusson's co-member of the Cape Club, Sir Henry 
Raeburn, our Scottish Sir Joshua Reynolds — agrees with 
this, being blue shining through black, or black with a blue 



134 FAMOUS SCOTS 

sheen. I regard the face as in every way a striking one 
and touched of the beautiful. 1 

Such is the story of Robert Fergusson — and before 
passing forward to assign his place among the vernacular 
Singers of Scotland (in next chapter) it must be permitted 
me to hark back on our interpretation of his young life to 
which I have been gradually leading up my readers. I have 
striven to keep before myself these words of George Eliot — 

' It was the fashion of old, when an ox was led out for sacrifice to 
Jupiter, to chalk the dark spots to give the offering a false show of 
unblemished whiteness. Let us fling away the chalk and boldly say — 
The victim is spotted.' 

I have not attempted to conceal that there were ' black 
spots ' that no whitest or thickest chalk could cover even if 
I had wished to try. I concede that born almost certainly 
to delicate health and sickliness of constitution and 
impetuosity of sensibility, he was natively irresolute and 
infirm of will and a day-dreamer. I have recognised that 
it was yoking a steed of the sun to almost a dung-cart to 
set him to the poor ' drudgery ' of the Commissary-Clerk's 
office and ' copying ' mechanically such documents as were de- 
manded. I have equally recognised that his sudden introduc- 
tion into the social life of Edinburgh of the period — frivolous, 
unthinking, self-centred, heartless, as it was, in its patronage 
of genius after its sorry fashion — exercised a disturbing not 
to say delirious fascination over him in its exchange of his 
poor rooms in Warriston's Close and ' Jamieson's Land,' and 
that he was no miraculous exception to the drinking usages 
of such Society from highest and sacredest to humblest, and 
whether in nut-brown ale or flowing claret. But all this con- 
science-ruled recognition must be tempered and sweetened by 
recognition likewise of the conditions under which Robert 
Fergusson hasted through the brief closing years (1772-74) 
of his young life. ' The Daft Days ' did not appear until 
January 2nd, 1772, and his ' Last Will ' and its ' Codicil' on 
November 25th and December 2nd, 1773, so that his 
literary life in so far as it was famous — for the English 

1 I have had this inestimable portrait exquisitely photogravured by 
Young of Edinburgh, to range with Walker's Nasmyth Burns (private 
plate). 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 135 

poems, commenced on Feburary 7th, 1 771, do not count — 
was covered by scarcely twelve months. Manifestly he was 
not the make of man for such an atmosphere as during this 
fateful year he breathed, and to me it is unspeakably 
affecting to take note of his numerous retreats from the city 
to the country — to pleasant Broomhouse (near Corstorphine), 
a health-resort once renowned for its medicinal well and 
' cream,' as it is still for its idyllic loveliness of scenery 
and treasured monuments in the ' auld kirk ' (not forgetting 
the old ' makker,' Sir John Rowll) — to North Belton 
(near Dunbar) — to Dumfries — to Haddington — to 
Restalrig — to Drumelzier — to St. Andrews and Fife — that 
he might escape and be his true self. I ask and re-ask 
recognition of this inward struggle. I ask recognition of 
the depth of the moral problem of resistance and over- 
coming, set us in him. I ask that we shall never for a 
moment forget that here was an admitted child of genius with 
an exquisitely strung nature physically sickly from the outset. 
I ask that it be realised that by temperament he was 
sensitive to every mood — now touched with Robert Burns's 
melancholia and now of feminine vivacity if not loquacity — 
an ^Eolian harp his symbol. I ask that it be taken into 
account that brilliant conversation was to him the life of his 
life. I ask that it be further remembered that it could not 
but be a release to pass from the mechanical drudgery of 
the Commissary-Clerk's office and the necessitated bareness 
of his mother's poor home in ' Jamieson's Land ' to the 
gaiety and brightness of club or tavern or oyster-cellar. I 
ask yet again that it be co-equally remembered that there 
was the attraction of manifold opportunity of exercising his 
faculty of keen observation of human nature, his swift 
satiric wit, his racy speech; nor less must we keep in 
mind that he was instinctively waggish and up to all 
manner of unharming mischief, and not at all one to study 
or to seek to fend himself from misconstruction of solemn 
foes and ' unco guid ' — former days Mrs. Grundys. Let 
these things be combined and grasped, and that twenty- 
four years rounded with a sleep his life, and the man (I can- 
not imagine a woman) must be of a hard heart, and worse, 
who refuses our apportionment of responsibility or our 
claim for sympathy, not platitudinary moralising, for Robert 



136 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Fergusson. I deny that Irving's cruel and unpardonable 
phrases of ' habitual dissipation ' and the like, and ' dissolute 
associates,' are true of him. I postulate that he was — if I 
may be excused returning on my own words — the victim 
of the manners (ethically) of the time. I must likewise with 
Mrs. Hugh Miller crown all with the authenticated fact 
that like William Collins, the 'one book' of dying Sir 
Walter, — who forgets his ' There is but one, Lockhart ' ? — was 
his inseparable companion, so that in her womanly words — 

' Fergusson's deathbed on the heaven- ward side was not dark. The 
returning reason, the comforts of the Word of Life, are glimpses of 
God's providence and grace that shine gloriously amid the utter dark- 
ness of those depths' (Preface to Tales and Sketches, p. x). 

As I read the broken words of the two Roberts — 
Robert Fergusson and his mightier successor, Robert 
Burns — in their ultimate sore travail of spirit, T find 
myself fired with indignation against your bigots and 
Pharisees who so exclaim against them as to all intents and 
purposes to affirm the impotence of the grace of God and 
God of grace to ' save to the uttermost ' and His blessed 
and not human but preter-human forgivingness, ' your sins 
and your iniquities' of the Past ( J shall remember no more.' 
Then — as before I have put it — within the larger there is a 
lesser problem psychologically — how far the All-wise and All- 
righteous and more than humanly pitiful holds a man 
responsible for the complexities and driving forces of the 
constitution and temperament with which he is born and in 
which he grows up ; how far He ' weighs ' the rush of tempta- 
tion on a susceptibility and responsiveness to which your 
cold, unimpassioned natures are strangers ; how far He 
' remembers ' compassionately the terrible spell of, I re-affirm, 
the unquestionable 'pleasures of sin.' Does God, ye orthodox 
of orthodox divines, take no account of heredity, and that 
heredity striven against to madness ? 

Alas ! alas ! alas ! One's heart is sore to-day over the 

tragedy of ' the Schelles.' 

' Swift and sudden fell the night ; 
Few the reverent tears that rose, 
O'er the young life's mournful close ; 
And scarce the loud world's wrestling throng 
Missed the woodland's silenc'd song.' 

(Mrs. H. W. Phillips.) 



CHAPTER XI 

THE POETRY OF FERGUSSON IN RELATION TO BURNS — CLAIM 
FOR HIS RIGHTFUL PLACE 

' And though that I, amang the lave, 
Unworthy be ane place to have, 
Or in their nummer to be tald, 
Ah lang in mynd my wark sail /uzlcl, 
Als haill in every circumstance, 
In forme, in matter and substance, 
But 1 wearing or consumption, 
Rust, canker, or corruption, 
As ony of their warkes all, 
Suppose that my reward be small.' 

William Dunbar. 

Having now told more fully than might have been ex- 
pected at this late day, and after so many meagre biographies, 
the chequered story of the short life of Robert Fergusson, it 
remains that I vindicate the modest claim that I mean to 
make for him of a place in the proud roll of vernacular 
Scottish poets. I begin by fortifying this claim with a little 
poem by one of his own maternal clan — the lamented 
Professor Edward Forbes — which though not, perhaps, 
without faults, seems to me admirably to present the thought 
that ought to rule us in working-out more especially the 
relation of his young precursor to Robert Burns. This is 
the first thing that I propose to deal with, not at all — need 
I say — with any idea of charging the mightier with plagiarism, 
but in order to verify Robert Burns's own abundant 
acknowledgments of obligation to Fergusson, and to 
establish the continuity of our Scottish poetry, and indeed 
of our Scottish literature as a whole. 

1 = without. 
137 



138 FAMOUS SCOTS 

A Night Scene. 

' A night-sky over-head : 

One solitary star 

Shining amid 
A little track of blue — for dark clouds hid 
Its sister sunlets ; on its azure bed 

It seemed a sun, for there 
No jealous planet shone with which it to compare. 

The dark clouds rolled away, 

And all heaven's shining train 

Of suns and stars, 
With the great moon, beamed forth their gorgeous light : 
Where then was that fair star that shone so bright? 

Where was it? None could say. 
Yet there it doubtless was, although it seemed away. 

So lustrous shall we find 

Each living soul 

When seen alone : 
And though when brighter spirits round it press, 
We lose its form and doubt its loveliness, 

Still should we bear in mind 
That it is not less bright although it be outshined.' 
{Memoir, by Wilson and Geikie, 1861, p. 257.) 

Andrew Lang caught up this exquisite fancy when, at a 
Burns anniversary dinner in Edinburgh in 189 1, he had the 
courage of his opinion to say — 

' Some people are inclined to ask — Are we quite sure that we are 
worshipping the right poet ? It is true that there are many poets, and 
I sometimes yield so far to the suggestion as to think that we might 
worship some of them a little more than we do. There is Fergusson, 
Burns's master, who died at twenty-four, a true poet, but so unfortunate 
after death as in life, that I doubt if we have a proper critical edition of 
Fergusson, and certainly we have not such an account of his life as might 
well be written.' l 

This recognised over-shadowing of Fergusson by Robert 
Burns seems to dictate the fundamental thing that I have 
already announced as first and foremost, viz. an attempt to 
settle the amoimt and quality of obligation on the part of 
successor to young for er miner ^ and to demofistrate the rela- 
tion and inter-relation and influence of the 1773 book on the 
1786-7 volume. This has only been done hitherto vaguely 

1 Mr. Lang was good enough to write me that then he had never 
chanced to meet with my 1851 edition. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 139 

and perfunctorily. Undue weight has been attached to Sir 
Walter's reminiscent opinion, that Burns seemed to him to 
speak with exaggerated gratitude of his indebtedness to 
Fergusson and Ramsay, in forgetfulness that great-heart 
Scott was but a ' laddie ' of some twelve or thirteen years at 
the time of his only meeting with him, and so demon- 
stratively, in long subsequently recalling the overheard words 
he must have imported into them his own later opinion and 
criticism. More recently, perhaps, no misjudgment has 
gone more deep toward under-valuation of Fergusson than 
that of our great and noble Thomas Carlyle, in his 
incomparably true and splendid essay on Burns. But the 
hastiest consideration of the context will convince that in 
this instance the illustrious essayist spoke from un- 
acquaintance — I shrink from the word ignorance — or 
mis-recollection of the poetry of Dunbar, Lyndsay, and 
Montgomery of earlier, and of Ramsay and Fergusson of 
later times, and that the thesis of Burns's autochthonalness 
and independence of all predecessors, and of Fergusson 
specifically, is an extremely shallow reading of the origins 
and progress of at once Scottish poetry and the poetry — 
greatest of all — of Robert Burns. But his characteristic 
letter to me on Ramsay and Fergusson (c. i.) atones for his 
earlier blundering. It is uncritical to sever the greater from 
the lesser, and to regard Burns's poetry as a stream unfed 
of other streams ; and yet that is what Thomas Carlyle 
did. 

I postulate now — that both Burns himself and his level- 
headed brother, Gilbert Burns, made specific acknowledg- 
ment of specific obligation to Fergusson. Take that to 
begin with, though it is the most superficial and obvious of 
all. ' The Cotter's Saturday Night ' sends us at once to 
two main sources — overpassing slighter — 'The Farmer's 
Ingle ' mainly, and subordinately or for form, Shenstone's 
delightful ' Schoolmistress.' ' The Farmer's Ingle ' every- 
one knows, and by turning to it anyone can see for him- 
self how Burns fetched the living water of inspiration 
from Fergusson's (so to say) hill-side spring. ' Leith Races ' 
with its opening vision of ' Mirth ' sends us again to the 
' Holy Fair ' and its opening vision of ' Fun,' ' Superstition,' 
and ' Hypocrisy ' — visions which in this instance Angellier 



140 FAMOUS SCOTS 

strangely misunderstands — as inevitably as it does to James 
Nicol's ' Kern Supper ' and its vision of the ' youthfu' Muse.' 
The immortal 'Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson' sends 
us once more not to black-letter ballads of which Burns 
never had heard, spite of Sir Walter's notion, but to 
discover that it is only a magnificent expansion of ' Elegy 
on the Death of Scots Music' ' The Twa Brigs ' similarly 
sends us to ' The Ghaists : a Kirkyard Eclogue ' and ' The 
Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey.' So is it 
through others of the most imperishable of the woven stuff of 
Burns's verse-loom, — e.g., 'Twa Dogs,' 'Tarn o' Shanter,' 
'Jolly Beggars,' — as shall appear in the sequel. 

It will not be gainsayed, I hope, that in these typical 
instances it was Robert Fergusson's several poems that led 
Robert Burns to write his ; or, if anyone choose to put it, 
that Robert Burns when he was inspired to write 'The 
Cotter's Saturday Night,' ' Holy Fair,' ' Elegy on Captain 
Matthew Henderson' — to recapitulate only three — inevitably 
remembered Robert Fergusson. 

This first thing is within the truth of our claim ; but, after 
all, whilst it is Fergusson's undying glory in these specific 
instances to have been the inspirer of Robert Burns in 
suggesting subjects and giving models, yet these do not 
reveal the weightier debt. These — as I have already put it 
— lie on the surface, and are at once recognisable and 
recognised. But it is when we go beneath the surface and 
dig deep that we discover how interpenetrative as the veining 
of the marble, not superficial, was Fergusson's influence ; that 
his metrical forms became Burns's metrical forms ; his 
rhymes and rhythms became Burns's rhymes and rhythms. 
Though alike in form and rhyme and rhythm, Fergusson in 
his turn had inherited them from Dunbar and Lyndsay, 
Montgomery and Semple, Ramsay and Hamilton of 
Gilbertfield, his vocabulary and phrases and felicitous 
lines largely became Burns's, and superseded his own 
Ayrshire dialectal words. His finest observation of nature 
and human nature, his most ebullient humour, his rarest 
insight into character, his sudden darts of emotion now of 
wrath and now of ruth, perpetually reflect Fergusson. 

Fergusson's influence was diffused and interfused. I now 
proceed to show this in detail. 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 141 

The interfused influence of Fergusson, I think, often comes 
out in unexpected places and from relatively unremarkable 
poems. This I wish to emphasise, for it demonstrates how the 
volume of 1773-79 had gone into the very blood as well as 
memory of Burns, and that not as iron but as enriching 
ozone. 

I have pronounced on the English poems that in their 
aggregate they were poor — conventional in thought and 
feeling and form. Nevertheless, Robert Burns let none of 
them escape him, nay, self-evidently must have learned 
them by heart (to adopt the fine Scottish phrase). Lines, 
stanzas, from the English poems occur and recur, and there 
is that final remembrance on his deathbed to which I have 
more than once referred, of the pathetic paraphrase on 
Job chap. iii. : — 

1 Say, wherefore has an over-bounteous Heaven 
Light to the comfortless and wretched given ? ' 

I point out as confirmatory of this element of influence, 
the plain source of one of the most noticeable of the stanzas 
of ' The Cotter's Saturday Night,' apart from ' The Farmer's 
Ingle ' — 

' Tremble, O Albion ! for the voice of Fate 
Seems ready to decree thy after-fall. 
By pride, by luxury, what fatal ills 
Unheeded have approach'd thy mortal frame ; 
How many foreign weeds their heads have rear'd 
In thy fair garden ! Hasten, ere their strength 
And baneful vegetation taint the soil, 
To root out rank disease, which soon must spread, 
If no bless'd antidote will purge away 
Fashion* s proud minions from otir sea-girt isle.* 

('Fashion.') 

This is admittedly meagre, but its very meagreness is 
precious critically as revealing how splendidly Burns trans- 
figures the humbler lines of his predecessor and gives them 
vigour and resonance — reminding us of how Sir Walter 
similarly takes Clauderds ' Humphrey Colquhoun's Farewell ' 
and crystallises its coarseness (as frost crystallises foulest 
water) into the lyric of Mary in The Pirate, sung by ' Claud 
Halcro.' 



i 4 2 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Let us now read st. 20 of ' The Cotter's Saturday Night ' — 

' O Scotia ! my dear, my native soil ! 

For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent ! 
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil 

Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content ! 
And, oh ! may Heaven their simple lives prevent 

From Luxury's contagion, weak and vile ! 
Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent, 
A virtuous populace may rise the while, 
And stand a wall of fire around their muck-lov'd Isle? 

Nor is this all in ' The Cotter's Saturday Night ' again 
apart from ' The Farmer's Ingle.' Fergusson's ' Retirement ' 
has this stanza — 

' For the calm comforts of an easy mind, 
In yonder lowly cot delight to dwell, 
And leave the statesman for the lab'ring hind, 
The regal palace for the humble cell.' 

{Works, 185 1, p. 195.) 

I place beside this a couplet from the same 'Cotter's 
Saturday Night ' — 

' Certes in fair Virtue's heavenly road 

The cottage leaves the palace far behind.' 

This line of observation, viz. Burns's recollection of 
Fergusson's poorest English poems, his absolute absorption 
of them, is perhaps still more demonstrated in this that (as 
I think) he fetched his pseudonymous name for his 
Platonically wooed Mrs. Maclehose, from the commonplace 
poem of ' Fashion ' above quoted — 

'Amongst the proud attendants of this shrine, 
The wealthy, young and gay Clarinda draws 
From poorer objects, the astonish'd eye.' 

So, too, Souter Johnny was long preceded by Souter Jock 
in ' The Election ' — a poem that colours several of Burns's, as 
he who runs may read. It is the more certain that the 
name Souter Jock caught on from Burns's reading of 
Fergusson in that ' Tam o' Shanter's ' Souter Johnny was 
no ' souter ' or shoemaker at all, but a farm-hand. 

The influence of Fergusson on Burns, however, will be 
still more revealed to the ' eident ' student of his vernacular 
poems. His boyish Elegy on the death of Professor David 
Gregory thus opens — 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 143 

' Now mourn, ye college masters a' ! 
And frae your ein a tear lat fa', 
Fam'd Gregory death has taen awa' 

Without remeid ; 
The skaith ye've met wi's nae that sma', 
Sin Gregory's dead.' 

Conceded, as our Poet with characteristic modesty re- 
minded his over-flattering admirer John Scott (?), Ramsay 
and Hamilton of Gilbertfield had used this form from their 
1 forbear ' fellow-makers ; none the less, who can mistake the 
source of this — 

' Lament in rhyme, lament in prose, 
Wi' saut tears trickling down your nose ; 
Our bardie's fate is at a close, 

Past a' remeid ; 
The last sad cap-stane of his woes, 
Poor Mailie's dead.' 

('Elegy on Death of Poor Mailie.') 

Or turn we to ' Man was made to mourn ' — 

' O man ! while in thy early years 
How prodigal of time ! 
Misspending all thy precious hours, 
Thy glorious youthful prime.' 

How much racier and more daintily expressed and 
memorable in this instance are the parallel four lines from 
that jewelled poem, ' Ode to the Bee ' — 

' Cou'd feckless creature, man, be wise, 
The simmer o' his life to prize, 
In winter he might fend fu' bald, 
His eild unkend to nippin' cald.' 

Fergusson's ' On seeing a Butterfly in the Street ' inter- 
weaves exactly such ethical moralising (in a good sense) as 
Burns ; e.g. — 

' To sic mishanter rins the laird 
Wha quats his ha'-house an' kail-yard ; 
Grows politician, scours to court, 
Whare he's the laughin'-stock and sport 
Of Ministers, wha jeer and jibe, 
And heeze his hopes wi' thought o' bribe, 
Till in the end they flae him bare, 
Leave him to poverty, and to care ; 
Their fieetching words o'er late he sees, 
He trudges hame, repines and dies.' 



i 4 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Everyone who knows his Burns will at once remember in 
1 The Twa Dogs ' — 

' Hech, man ! dear sirs ! is that the gate,' etc. 

So onward in the same poem of the doers of the 
1 Grand Tour ' — 

' At operas an' plays parading,' etc. 

1 Hame Content ' anticipates this and a great deal more — 

' Some daft chiel reads, and taks advice ; 
The chaise is yokit in a trice ; 
Awa' drives he like huntit deil, 
And scarce tholes time to cool his wheel, 
Till he's Lord kens how far awa', 
At Italy, or Well o' Spa, 
Or to Montpelier's safter air, — 
For far-aff fowls hae feathers fair.' 

Fergusson's longest poem of ' Auld Reekie ' reminds us 
throughout of Burns. With what pith and power and 
aptly strong words he paints religious hypocrisy, and after 
describing the gay throngs dressed in their Sunday clothes, 
all solemn-faced and grim, how fine is his scorn — 

'Why should Religion make us sad, 
If good frae Virtue's to be had? 
Na, rather gleefu' turn your face ; 
Forsake Hypocrisy's grimace ; 
And never have it understood 
You fleg mankind frae being good.' 

Even Burns's ' Epistle to a Young Friend,' full as it is of 

wit as of wisdom and of wisdom as of wit, does not eclipse 

this — 

' The great Creator to revere, 

Must sure become the creature ; 
But still the preaching cant forbear, 
And ev'n the rigid feature.' 

Nor in the ' Twa Brigs,' thus — 

1 Cuifs of later times wha held the notion 
That sullen gloom was sterling true devotion.' 

A high pulse of patriotic enthusiasm beats in this too 
little studied poem of ' Auld Reekie.' How deep was his 
love for his native city and its surroundings, and how 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 145 

impassioned his regrets over the de-nationalising of his 
country — as up to well-nigh 1800 it was held, and by those 
who were not Jacobites ! 

' While dandring Cits delight to stray 
To Castle-hill, or public way, 
Whare they nae other purpose mean 
Than that fool cause, o' being seen ; 
Let me to Arthur's Seat pursue 
Whare bonny pastures meet the view ; 
And mony a wild-lorn scene accrues, 
Befitting Willie Shakespeare's Muse ; 
If Fancy there would join the thrang, 
The desart rocks and hills amang, 
To echoes we should lilt and play, 
And gie to Mirth the lee-lang day. 

Or shou'd some canker'd biting show'r 
The day and a' her sweets defiow'r, 
To Holyrood-house let me stray, 
And gie to musing a' the day ; 
Lamenting what auld Scotland knew, 
Bien days, for ever frae her view. 

Hamilton ! for shame ! the Muse 
Would pay to thee her couthy vows, 
Gin ye wad tent the humble strain, 
And gie's our dignity again : 

For O, waes me ! the thristle springs 
In domicile of ancient kings, 
Without a patriot to regret 
Our palace, and our ancient state.' 

1 JFuimuSy writes Sir William Stirling-Maxwell here, in his 
annotated copy of Fergusson ; and even in a.d. 1897 it is 
not too perfervid to denounce the Duke of Hamilton's 
tearing down Bellenden's lovely porch and turning Queen 
Mary Scots' royal garden into a cabbage-field. Now we 
read Burns — 

' Edina ! Scotia's darling seat ! 

All hail thy palaces and tow'rs, 
Where once beneath a monarch's feet, 

Sat Legislation's sov'reign pow'rs ! 
From marking wildly-scatter'd flowers, 

As on the banks of Ayr I stray' d, 
And singing, lone, the ling'ring hours, 

1 shelter in thy honour'd shade.' 

I said earlier that Fergussoniana turn up in unexpected 
10 



146 FAMOUS SCOTS 

places in Burns's poems. Here is one of many examples. 
In ' Caller Water ' we have — 

'When father Adie first pat spade in 
The bonny yard of ancient Eden ; ' 

and lo ! it reappears of all places in the ' Address to the 

Deil »— 

' Lang syne in Eden's bonny yard.' 

Had space permitted we should have followed these 
parallels and (but in no ill sense) conveyings, with tabulations 
of words and turns of expression in Fergusson that Burns 
over and over employs. I can only very briefly illustrate 
this. Going back on ' The Election,' we read — 

'Then Deacons at the Council stent 
To get themselves presentit ; 
For towmonths twa their saul is lent 
For the town's gude indentit' 

Cf. ' Twa Dogs '— 

' Thrang a-parliamentin' 
For Britain's gnde his saul indenting '.' 

In like manner Fergusson's double-syllabled rhymes kept 
ringing in Burns's memory ; e.g. taking only one example out 
of abundant, Fergusson has this — 

'Death, what's ado? the de'il be licket, 
Or wi' your stang ye ne'er had pricket, 
Or our auld Alma Mater tricket 

O' poor John Hogg, 
And trail'd him ben thro' your mirk wicket 

As dead's a log.' 

See how Burns, writing in hot haste to Collector Mitchell, 
falls back on Fergusson — 

'Ye've heard this while how I've been licket, 
And by fell Death was nearly nicket ; 
Grim loun ! he gat me by the fecket, 

And sair me sheuk ; 
But by gude luck I lap a wicket 

And turn'd a neuk.' 

Be it noted also that the familiar address to Death, 

* Death, what's ado ? ' is of kin with Burns's familiarity in 

• Death and Doctor Hornbook.' 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 147 

The reader who wishes to pursue for himself this line 
of Burns's obligation to his precursor, will find it interesting 
to take any good glossary, e.g. of the Philadelphia Fergusson 
of 181 5, or to tick off the words in any similar Burns glossary, 
or in Cuthbertson's Concordance. As a rule, it will be 
found that when the words are not Ayrshire, Fergusson 
has been drawn upon. This is a vein worth working. 

I venture to assume that I have advanced enough to 
vindicate my postulate, that throughout Fergusson's poems 
saturated the mind, heart, imagination, affection, and 
memory, and imposed subjects and forms and elect words 
on Robert Burns. That, when all is said, Robert Burns 
still stands by head and shoulders above Robert Fergusson 
and beyond all possible comparison Scotland's supremest 
singer; that his was the larger, stronger soul, the richer 
imagination, the more inspired utterance, the more seeing 
eyes, the broader intellect, does not alter the fact of wide, 
deep, and pervasive obligations to his precursor. Mentally 
as physically he was stalwart where Fergusson was fragile ; 
he was dowered with immeasurable resources where Fergus- 
son was soon exhausted ; he was master of all moods and 
passions where Fergusson was only their victim ; he was 
possessor of Elisha's wished-for ' double portion ' of poetic 
inspiration where Fergusson was at best fitfully and briefly 
fired and inspired. But with every limitation of genius and 
range, it abides that it was a happy day for Robert Burns, 
and a still happier day for the immortal in Scottish poetry, 
whereon he fell in with Robert Fergusson's volume of 
1773-79. This being so, I must enter my protest against 
any minimising of Burns's acknowledgment of debt and 
fervour of gratitude. He might not be a competent judge of 
English poetry, and one smiles at his superlative praise of 
Shenstone and Mrs. Barbauld and at his way of celebrating 
Shakespeare (if the poem be his, which I doubt), but no man 
in all Scotland was better judge than he of Scottish poetry. 
Therefore, as it was the result of unquestionable veracity and 
sincerity, so it was nicest accuracy of statement of the truth, 
when he proclaimed that Fergusson had been his inspirer to 
emulation. This puts a nimbus of glory around the young 
Poet that never can pale. One feels, too, that Burns's 
acknowledgments compare more than favourably with Sir 



148 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Walter's astonishing over-statement of obligation to Maria 
Edgeworth; or, to go farther back, Richard Crashaw's 
naming his immortal things ' Steps to the Temple ' {i.e. of 
George Herbert). 

Not less important as a factor in our claim for Robert 
Fergusson is his final decision and election to be a vernacular 
poet. This came — if I may be allowed a homely expression 
— in ' the nick of time.' For it is the outstanding merit of 
Fergusson — though merit is too thin a word — and one which 
peculiarly belongs to him, that, unawed by the mixed and 
meretricious splendour of the contemporary verse of the 
1 predominant partner,' he was proud of Scotland, proud of 
being a Scot, thrice-proud of being a citizen of Edinburgh, 
and patriotically proud to hold in reverential memory the 
achievements of our national heroes and men of 'wecht.' 
More than that — Wordsworth was not more exultant that he 
spake the language Milton spoke, than was Robert Fergusson 
to speak the tongue of the Scottish poets of the past, from 
William Dunbar and Sir David Lyndsay to Allan Ramsay. 
I hold it for a crown of honour that, instead of imitating 
the example set by Drummond of Hawthornden, William 
Alexander Earl of Stirling, and Sir Robert Aytoun of the 
prior century — though he dearly loved them all — or by 
immediate predecessors and contemporaries, like James 
Thomson, David Mallet, Dr. John Armstrong, William 
Falconer, Dr. John Arbuthnot, David Hume, Henry 
Mackenzie, and Dr. John Moore, he was not ashamed of 
his mother ' leid ' ; but saw and felt as passionately as John 
Ruskin of our time, the wealth, the sweetness, the vigour, 
the humour, the pathos, the melodious vowelled charm of 
native Scotch, and acted accordingly when once, as we saw, 
he had ' found himself.' The poet of the ' Gentle Shepherd ' 
had with pungent appeal and rebuke addressed his fellow- 
countrymen on this — 

'The chiels of London, Cam and Ox, 
Have reared up great poetic stocks, 
Of Rapes, of Btcckets, Sarks, and Socks, 

While we neglect 
To shaw their betters. This provokes 

Me to reflect 
On the learn'd days of Gawn Dunkell ; 
Our country then a tale cou'd tell ; 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 149 

Europe had nane mair snack and snell, 

In verse and prose ; 
Our kings were poets too themsel', 

Bauld and jocose.' 

While ' honest Allan ' lived, his remonstrance was partially 
successful, and he gathered around him that group of 
1 young gentlemen ' to which we have had frequent occasion 
to refer. It was a group ot which Edinburgh saw not the 
like again until a rounded century had passed. ' Fair 
ladies ' also — Jane Elliot, Mrs. Cockburn, Lady Anne 
Lindsay, Lady Grizzel Baillie, earlier, gave their very finest 
in the vernacular. Fergusson took his stand there ; but it 
demanded courage to do it. Have we not Professor Dugald 
Stewart, after Burns be it remembered, talking of our ' uncouth 
and degraded dialect ' ? l Have we not Dr. James Beattie 
perpetrating these stupendous banalities — 

' To write in the vulgar broad Scotch, and yet to write seriously, is 
now impossible. For more than half a century past it has even by the 
Scots been considered as the dialect of the vulgar.' 2 

And so the ' Gentle Shepherd ' he calls ' vulgar ' ! Worse 
still, he thus writes of his own preposterously over-praised 
son, J. H. Beattie — 

' He was early warned against the use of Scottish words and other 
similar improprieties ; and his dislike to them was such that he soon 
learned to avoid them ; and, after he grew up, would never endure to 
read what was written in any of the vulgar dialects of Scotland. He 
looked into Mr. Allan Ramsay's poems, but did not relish them. 
Whether the more original strains of Mr. Burns ever came in his way 
I do not certainly know.' 

Detestable young prig ! 

Even sagacious Dr. Samuel Johnson ventured to prophesy, 
though he did not know, that 

' The Scottish dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial 
and rustic even to themselves.' 3 

These Titanic blunderings explain how conventionalism 
was for the time enthroned ; how pseudo-pastorals were set 
up as the mode ; how the poet-tasters of the day caught 

1 Memoir of Robertson, p. 185. 2 Essays, 1779, p. 381. 

3 Tour to the Hebrides. 



150 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the 'tune' of Pope, but without either his concentrated 
weight of thought or surpassing melody. 'Vulgar' was 
written over any use of the mother-tongue. And yet it had 
been the language of Scotland's noblest and wisest, and was 
really more purely Saxon-English than the inane, stilted, 
artificial verse and prose of the period. Hence it is that I 
designated the appearance in the Weekly Magazine of ' The 
Daft Days,' and ' Elegy on the Death of Scots Music,' and 
the rest, as the advent of a new poet with a new note. I 
reiterate, and do not withdraw or minimise, my appreciation. 
These vernacular poems broke over the land like a celestial 
melody, and not without the trumpet-summons that Sir 
Philip Sidney ascribed to the ballad of ' Chevy Chase.' 

I must regard it as a manly as well as a fine thing in 
Robert Fergusson to have thus kept his allegiance to his 
native tongue, a tongue ' understanded of the people.' 
Therefore, for what it was in itself and for the outcome of the 
stand taken on it, I regard the vernacular poetry of Robert 
Fergusson as making a landmark in our Scottish literature. 
For merriness and raciness and graphic touches, it was a 
strain that Scotland had not heard since the new cantos of 
1 Christ's Kirk on the Green ' issued from the Luckenbooths. 
I avow it as my conviction that, if 'The Daft Days,' 'Elegy 
on the Death of Scots Music,' 'The King's Birthday in 
Edinburgh,' 'Caller Oysters,' 'Braid Claith,' 'Hallowfair' 
(both poem and ballad-song), ' To the Tron Kirk Bell,' 
'Caller Water,' 'Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and 
Causey,' 'The Rising of the Session,' 'Ode to the Bee,' 
'The Farmer's Ingle,' 'Leith Races,' 'The Ghaists,' 'On 
seeing a Butterfly in the Street,' ' Hame Content,' ' Ode to 
the Gowdspink,' 'The Election,' 'Elegy on John Hogg,' 
'The Sitting of the Session,' 'To my Auld Breeks,' had 
gone bodily for the first time into the Kilmarnock volume 
of 1786 or the Edinburgh volume of 1787, they would 
have been pronounced equal to most of the others, and 
worthy to take their place beside them. I grant that it 
would have been felt that none of them reached the level 
of ' The Jolly Beggars ' (but it was posthumous), or ' The 
Vision,' or 'To a Mouse,' or 'To a Mountain Daisy,' or 
the verse - epistles, while the Songs of after - years put 
comparison out of the question. Nevertheless, Robert 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 151 

Fergusson holds his own, and more than his own, even 
alongside of Robert Burns up to his twenty-fourth year. 

A valuable element in Fergusson's vernacular poetry is 
that he was to ' the manor born] if so I may read and spell 
the word. Baring-Gould in his Preface to Songs and Ballads 
of the West has excellently ridiculed the ' modern composi- 
tions of educated writers who have amused themselves in 
writing dialect.' They are not of indigenous growth. 
They spring not from the soil, but from the tomes of the 
English Dialect Society. 

There is nothing of this artificiality or over-doing in 
Robert Fergusson's vernacular poetry. Born and bred in 
Edinburgh, a High School boy, where he inherited the 
metropolitan Scots, the daily speech of 'Auld Reekie' 
itself and of the surrounding East and Midlothian country- 
places of his many rural visits and haunts, our Poet never 
became provincial or parochial, as even Robert Burns does, 
to the puzzlement of more than his English-born readers. 
Everyone knows how this supremacy of the metropolitan 
speech was affirmed by William Dunbar in his word-flyting 
with Kennedy, and how he taunted him with his uncouth 
Ayrshire tongue as compared with his Lothian — 

' I haif on me a pair of Lothian hipps 
Sail fairer Ingles mak, and mair perfyte 
Than thou can blatter with thy Carrick l/pps. > 

I therefore appropriate to Robert Fergusson, William 
Pitt's characterisation of Burns — ' I can think of no verse 
since Shakespeare's that has so much the appearance of 
coming sweetly from Nature.' 

There is accordingly no effort, no studying or posing for 
effect in his vernacular poems. He sees and he hears ; he 
puts into his verse what he so sees and hears with a fulness 
of knowledge and a brightness of characterising that came to 
him intuitively, as his earliest preserved poems — the Horace 
Ode and the Elegy on Gregory, in his fourteenth year — 
abundantly prove. 

&.<$> a first corollary of this my argument, I would remark 
that Fergusson is peculiarly apt in his finding of the right 
words. He never or very rarely fails to hit on the genuine 
answering rhyme without padding as without archaism, ever 



152 FAMOUS SCOTS 

holding in recollection that it was to his ' brither Scots ' of 
the commonalty he mainly spoke. For he would have made 
his own the proud annunciation of Robert of Bourne — 

' For lewde men I undertoke 
In Englyshe tunge to male this boke,' — 

of course reading Scottish for English, and by 'lewd' 
meaning not its corrupt sense to-day, but as deriven from 
1 leod,' the people. 

Robert Burns was not above yielding his own better 
judgment to genteel prejudices in the matter of language, 
and those who would enjoy a real literary treat will hasten 
to get the Memoir of Hew Ainslie, by T. C. Latto, in 
collection of his Rhymes and Poems, and read his delicious 
badinage on Burns's altering of ' Gowan ' to ' Mountain 
Daisy' in the great poem. There are other mistakes. 
Fergusson never made such ; albeit as he knew nothing 
of the labor limce there is occasional lack of finish. 

Very welcome is Mr. Alexander Gordon's final verdict — 

' Fergusson's best poetic work is slender in quantity, but it is priceless 
in merit. Much of it, indeed, is of the finest gold. . . . No one has 
handled better than he Edinburgh's "brave metropolitan utterance," as 
Robert Louis Stevenson calls it, the rich, racy Doric of Auld Reekie in 
the eighteenth century' {Gentleman s Magazine, vol. 277, p. 392). 

I do not continue the quotation, because I do not accept 
Mr. Gordon's exaltation of Fergusson at the expense of 
Allan Ramsay, and I may not tarry to refute it. 

Fergusson was quite aware of his spontaneity and 
inevitableness. I recall his verse-letter to John Scott (?) 
of Berwick, when refusing comparisons with Ramsay and 
Penecuik, and modestly describing his own Muse — 

' At times whan she may lowse her pack 
I'll grant that she can find a knack 
To gar auld-warld wordies clack 

In hamespun rhyme ; 
While ilk ane at his billy's back 

Keeps guid Scots time.' 

Burns coarsens the close of this stanza into 'rank at 
their a — — .' Fergusson's is a singularly just as well as 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 153 

humble estimate of his poetic gift. It was c at times ' only, 
and it was a ' knack? 

The inevitableness and truthfulness to fact of which I have 
been writing were well expressed by Andrew Gray in his 

verse-letter — 

1 How blyth am I whan I do see 
A piece o' your fine poetrie ; 
It gars me laugh fou merrilie, 

Because there's nane 
That gies sic great insight to me 
As yours itlane. 1 

Ye've English plain enough, nae doubt, 
And Latin too ; but ye do suit 
Your lines to fo'k that's out about 

'Mang hills and braes ; 
This is the thing that gars me shout 

Sae loud your praise.' 

Fergusson thus stepped in, or rather bounded in, at the 
right moment to give the neglected mother-tongue a new 
lease of life parallel with the everyday spoken speech, and 
thereby also he has preserved ways of thinking and feeling and 
speaking, ' characters,' manners, customs, observances, super- 
stitions, peculiarities of town and country that but for him 
had long since flitted from men's memories. He has, in short, 
in association with Robert Burns, preserved for us the living 
Past of his native ' bonnie Scotland ' as a whole, and of 
'Auld Reekie' in particular, that he loved as only Sir 
Walter and Robert Louis Stevenson did, and has so painted 
for us all the lights and shadows of Scottish habits and 
usages and home-scenes and occupations, that they pulsate 
with life to-day, and ever shall. 

As part and portion of all this Robert Fergusson kept 
alive the altar-fire of patriotism. His imagination was 
coloured by ballad-memories of the Border. He was the 
first to give Hamilton of Bangour his rightful rank as the 
singer of the ' Braes of Yarrow,' and so was among the first 
to celebrate that land — ' discover ' is the word of the day — 
over which lies the light of glory that shone from Sir 
Walter to William Wordsworth. We must here read 
'Hame Content,' that so stirred Burns to emulation, and 
is found like attar of roses in poem after poem. 
1 = by itself, without consulting others. 



154 FAMOUS SCOTS 

'The Arno and the Tibur lang 
Hae run fell clear in Roman sang ; 
But, save the reverence of schools ! 
They're baith but lifeless dowy pools, 
Dought they compare wi' bonny Tweed, 
As clear as ony lammer-bead? 
Or are their shores mair sweet and gay 
Than Fortha's haughs or banks o' Tay? 
Tho 5 there the herds can jink the show'rs 
'Mang thriving vines an' myrtle bow'rs, 
And blaw the reed to kittle strains, 
While echo's tongue commends their pains ; 
Like ours, they canna warm the heart 
Wi' simple, saft, bewitching art. 
On Leader haughs an' Yarrow braes, 
Arcadian herds wad tyne their lays, 
To hear the mair melodious sounds 
That live on our poetic grounds. 

Come, Fancy ! come, and let us tread 
The simmer's flow'ry velvet bed, 
And a' your springs delightfu' lowse 
On Tweeda's banks or Cowdenknows, 
That, ta'en wi' thy inchanting sang, 
Our Scottish lads may round ye thrang, 
Sae pleas'd, they'll never fash again 
To court you on Italian plain ; 
Soon will they guess ye only wear 
The simple garb o' Nature here ; 
Mair comely far, an' fair to sight 
When in her easy cleething dight, 
Than in disguise ye was before 
On Tibur's, or on Arno's shore.' 

I will admit that Fergusson need not have made ' odious 
comparisons,' or in any way have dispraised his known favour- 
ites, Horace and Virgil, for as Archbishop Trench has 
admirably said of a like flaw in Sir Walter Raleigh's superb 
sonnet on the ' Faery Queen,' — ' the great poets of the Past 
lose no whit of their glory because later were found worthy 
to share it ' {Household Book of English Poetry). But in 
defence of Fergusson it must be said that his invective 
was directed against those bastard-Scots who would not 
let their own country's poetry or music ' share the glory,' 
but would — like Dr. Beattie — think to annihilate it by pro- 
nouncing the shibboleth of — ' Vulgar.' 

It is one of the many distinctions of Fergusson that the 
initial lines of the above quotation from ' Hame Content ' 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 155 

forms the motto of c. i. of The Fair Maid of Perth, while 
there can be no question that our Poet's tribute to Hamilton 
of Bangour was in recollection when Sir Walter sang — 

1 Harp of the North, that mouldering long hast hung 
On the witch-elm that shades St. Fillan's spring.' 

('Lady of the Lake.') 

This catches up Fergusson's lament — 

'Near what bright burn or crystal spring 
Did you your winsome whistle hing?' 

Scott, Leyden, Hogg, are all debtors to Fergusson — 
the more blamable, therefore, that the Ettrick Shepherd, 
whilst at the end of ' The Queen's Wake ' he celebrates 
Bangour, Ramsay, Langhorne, Leyden, Scott, should have 
forgotten our Poet. 

A final factor toward our claim for Robert Fergusson is 
the fineness of his observation of nature and his instinctive 
discovery of poetry where only the hardest and harshest 
prose of life was supposed to exist. I would accentuate this 
twofold aspect of these poems. I suspect that beloved Sir 
Walter did him an unintended injustice in choosing for 
mottoes of his immortal novels almost wholly from his 
city-poems, and by pronouncing him the poet-laureate of 
'Auld Reekie,' that is, of town-life. I have claimed for 
him that he is emphatically that, and as such has preserved 
for us such pictures of the every-day and special-days 
ongoings as never have been surpassed for humour, for 
raciness, for salt of wit, for picturesqueness. But this 
penetrative observation of men and women, this insight 
into character, this Teniers and Gerard Dow-like faithfulness 
in reflecting low life, must be placed on a lower level than 
his observation of Nature and sympathy with all living 
creatures, even the humblest, from ' Bee ' and ' Butterfly ' 
to s Gowdspink ' and lowly lives of lowly folks. 

The non-recognition of this has hidden, I hesitate not to 
say, no little of our Poet's most exquisite work — work 
inspired by the country, not the city. Nor is this other 
than we might have expected. For in nothing has Angellier 
so blundered as in his imagination that Fergusson saw 
nature only from some lofty garret window. This is just 



156 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the opposite of fact. For to begin with, as Stevenson 
warbles as Sir Philip might have done had he known 
Edinburgh, there was no ' airt ' that men passed to or 
from but opened out into the country. Steepest 'close,' 
narrowest 'pend,' most thronged square, led to green and 
blue and gold, and had ' wafts ' of ' caller air ' and glints of 
gurgling 'caller water.' 

In our Poet's time the city ' throned on crags ' (it is 
Wordsworth's description) was crowded within narrow 
bounds, and all beyond were green fields and woods and 
the flashing sea. 

I recall likewise that, as our narrative has shown, he had 
months on months in the North among the hills and forests 
and waters of Aberdeenshire \ that some of his best poems 
are dated from Broomhouse and North Belton and other 
places in Fife and elsewhere; that for four years — as 
abundantly shown — he was a constant accompanier of 
Professor William Wilkie to his ' Cameron ' farms. Hence 
he was no amateur in relation to the country ; and with 
those great eyes of his, self-evidently he allowed nothing 
to escape him of rural life and manners. 

I ask the reader to turn — after ' The Farmer's Ingle ' — 
to the Eclogue on Wilkie, and to mark the familiarity 
shown, Burns-like, with all the objects of farm-life ; e.g. 
' The blades o' claver wat wi' pearls o' dew,' — ' Our eldin's 
( = winter-fuel) driven, an' our har'st is owr,' — 'Our rucks 
( = ricks) fu' thick are stackit i' the yard,' — 'For the Yule- 
feast a sautit mart's prepar'd,' — 

' Thof to the weet my ripen'd aits had fawn, 
Or shake-winds owr my rigs wi' pith had blawn,' — 

* Yon broom-thackit brae,' — ' My colly Ringie youf d an' 
yowl'd a' night,' — ' While slow-gawn owsen turn the flow'ry 
swaird,' — 'While bonny lambies lick the dews of spring,' — 
' While gaudsmen whistle, or while birdies sing,' — 

'Ye saw yoursel' how weel his mailin' thrave, 
Ay better faugh'd an' snodit than the lave,' — 

' Lang had the thristles an' the dockans been 
In use to wag their taps upo' the green, 
Whare now his bonny rigs delight the view, 
An' thriving hedges drink the caller dew.' 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 157 

All this being so, a visit to Wilkie's farm and neighbour- 
hood to-day brings confirmatory evidence of how advantaged 
during all or nearly all his academic terms Fergusson was 
to observe the country. Therefore, while not born as Robert 
Burns was, or bred . to farming, I claim for him fulness of 
knowledge, accuracy of vision, and immeasurable enjoyment 
in breathing the ' caller air ' and drinking ' caller water.' 

Then as a corollary of all this, the simple fact that he 
elected to take for subject 'The Farmer's Ingle,' that he 
discerned the possibilities of poetry in it, ranges him with 
Robert Burns, and antedates that renaissance which flowered 
so gloriously in Wordsworth. Since Ramsay none had 
thought of such a subject for poetry as 'The Farmer's 
Ingle.' I wish I could have turned to account here Hugh 
Halliburton's penetrative criticism on all this, and Mr. 
Henry M 'Arthur's. 

But ' The Farmer's Ingle ' does not stand alone. How 
brilliant is this nature-painting in opening of 'Leith Races' ! — 

' In July month, ae bonny morn, 
When Nature's rokelay 1 green 
Was spread ower ilka rig o' corn, 

To charm our rovin' een ; 
Glouring about I saw a quean, 

The fairest 'neath the lift ; 
Her een were o' the siller sheen, 
Her skin like snawy drift, 

Sae white that day.' 

No marvel Robert Burns fell in love with that ' quean ' ! 
Could any painter have given a background of landscape to 
the sudden vision of ' Mirth ' with a finer touch ? Some 
one has hyper-criticised that both in ' Leith Races ' and in 
' Holy Fair ' the visions disappear. Of course, but in 
1 Leith Races ' it is to be assumed that Mirth secretly guides 
to the various comic scenes and spectacles. 

Take, as comparison, a winter scene, and forgive 'minimum' 
and ' doth ' in it — 

'Now mirk December's dowie face 
Glowers ower the rigs wi' sour grimace, 
While, through his minimum o' space, 

The bleer-e'ed sun, 
Wi' blinkin' light and stealin' pace, 
His race doth run.' 

1 = mantle. 



158 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Another winter scene, if surpassed perhaps by Phineas 
Fletcher, yet rises into sublimity, and visualises Edinburgh 
in December — 

' Mankind but scanty pleasure glean 
Frae snawy hill or barren plain, 
Whan Winter, 'midst his nipping train, 

W? frozen spear, 
Sends drift ower a' his bleak domain, 
And guides the weir.' 

Mr. Gordon asks, ' Might not these lines have been 
Burns's own ? ' 

' Is there on earth that can compare 
Wi' Mary's shape and Mary's air, 
Save the empurpled speck that glows 
In the saft faulds o' yonder rose?' 

En passant, the mention of ' Mary ' so sweetly, and of 
other feminine names, and perhaps his song of the ' Lea 
Rig,' suggest that Fergusson may have had his sweetheart, 
though his circumstances forbade marriage. 

We have again and again single lines that paint us a 
whole landscape with touches of quaint conceit ; e.g. — 

'When Phoebus did his winnocks sleek.' 

' Upon the tap o' ilka lum 

The sun began to keek? 

"Twas e'enin', when the speckled gowdspink sang, 
When new fa'n dew in blobs o' crystal hang.' 

'Now Morn wi' bonnie purple smiles, 
Kisses the air-cock o' Saunt Giles.' 

It were an easy task of love to multiply such ' brave 
translunary things,' but pace Matthew Arnold it is not 
always wise to pick out lines or couplets. Sufficient I hope 
has been said and quoted to make good my contention that 
it is not the painting of city-life which shows Fergusson at 
his best ; and I ask that it be recollected that he shares 
with Burns the distinction that his ' glorious dawnings ' 
went into that light which the great poet of Nature gratefully 
tells us he 

'hailed when first it shone, 
And showed my youth 
How verse may build a princely throne 
On humble truth. ' 



ROBERT FERGUSSON 159 

Archdeacon Hannah has well expressed the raison d'etre 
of such a vindication of claim as I am leading up to for 
Robert Fergusson. 

'The minor poetry,' he says, 'of any age has an especial historical 
value as savouring more of the age than the productions of greater 
minds; which are "not of an age but for all time"' {Introduction to 
Courtly Poets). 

And again — 

' When we wish to tell how a current flows, we do not look at the 
strong trees which grow up in its stream, and yet cannot be moved by 
its utmost power, but at the willows and rushes that bend before it and 
point to the direction in which it tends ' {Elizabethan Poetry in 
British Critic , by Hannah). 

This holds manifoldly of Fergusson ; for while reaching 
back to Dunbar and Lyndsay, Henryson and Montgomery, 
and clasping hands with Allan Ramsay and his 'young 
gentlemen,' and getting into touch anticipatively with 
Robert Burns, he has given us the Scotland and Scottish 
people of his brief lifetime. 

Is it said that especially his city poems of 'The Daft 
Days,' ' Leith Races,' ' Hallowfair,' and their kin, were too 
low for poetic celebration? I answer, contemporaries 
might have (foolishly) alleged the same objection against 
the odes of Pindar and Bacchylides. 

My claim, therefore, for Robert Fergusson, as I have all 
along stated, is a modest but a definite one. He is to be 
gratefully remembered for what his vernacular poems did for 
Robert Burns ; for what he did in the nick of time in 
asserting the worth and dignity and potentiality of his and 
our mother-tongue ; for his naturalness, directness, veracity, 
simplicity, raciness, humour, sweetness, melody ; for his 
felicitous packing into lines and couplets sound common 
sense ; for his penetrative perception that the man and not 
' braid claith ' or wealth is ' the man for a' that ' ; for his 
patriotic love of country and civil and religious freedom ; 
and for the perfectness — with only superficial scratches 
rather than material flaws — of at least thirteen of his 
vernacular poems, and for sustaining the proud tradition 
and continuity of Scottish song. 

As for the man distinct in so far as he can be made 



160 FAMOUS SCOTS 

distinct from the poet, I have failed indeed if I have not 
thrown off from him for ever the Irving - originated 
moralising, and won for him not blame but pity ; not 
sentencing but sympathy ; not judging him by lapses through 
stress of circumstance but by what was best in him ; and it 
is my hope that every reader will rejoice with me that well- 
nigh a century and a quarter after his poor wasted body was 
borne to its last resting-place in Canongate Churchyard, 
there are still multitudes of ' brither Scots ' all the world 
over to whom his memory is dear and tender. 

That, as over against the multitude of Edinburgh celebrities 
contemporary with the young ' Writer chiel,' they should be 
all but utterly forgotten while he is thus remembered and 
loved, reminds me of an entry in a ' Naturalist's Journal ' of 
1695 that I took opportunity to verify. This naturalist 
came upon tufts of a rare fern in one of the most secluded 
and stormiest of the passes of Moffatdale. Wandering 
there, and guided by the description to the very rock and 
spot, I there found, after nearly two hundred years, a 
whole breadth of the fern, as dainty and delicate and green 
as at the beginning. 

How many human lives had in the intervening centuries 
ended, but the tiny fern lived on. How many fortunes of 
gentle and simple had changed, but the tiny fern lived on. 
How many disappearances had taken place of great families 
and family mansions, but the tiny fern lived on. Inquiry 
resulted in discovering great houses extinct — well-known 
families now unknown — splendid tombs shattered or 
obliterated. Is it not a parable of Robert Fergusson's 
fame ? The modest, unpretending, homely Scottish poems 
of kindly humour and weighty sense have outlived books of 
once-called 'great' men, who would have scorned anyone 
who had dared to prophesy that the little volume of 1773-79 
would be known and prized when their lauded folios and 
quartos would be lying undisturbed in Advocates' Library or 
British Museum. Is there -another instance of so humbly- 
placed a Singer having at least a score of biographers? I 

HAVE DONE. 



